Marocco is in shock. The official news of the death of five-year-old Rayan was spread by the royal family. A little later called King Mohamed VI. to the little boy’s parents to express his condolences. Rescue workers could only rescue Rayan dead from a well shaft on Saturday evening. For five days, many people in North Africa and beyond followed the salvage work live on the Internet. Hundreds of residents came from neighboring towns and spent the nights nearby so as not to leave their relatives alone. But the miracle everyone was hoping for never happened.
Rayan fell into the 32 meter deep and narrow shaft on Tuesday not far from his home in the village of Ighrane in the Rif Mountains in the north of the kingdom. His family and neighbors searched for him for hours until they heard whimpering from the shaft. They lowered a mobile phone on a rope and turned on the camera. “Get me out of here,” the boy shouted from the depths, according to a report in the Spanish newspaper “El País”. Rescue workers later supplied the boy with water and oxygen this way.
The race against time began on Tuesday afternoon, because at an altitude of a good 700 meters it gets very cold at night. First, the rescuers dug a parallel hole up to the height where they suspected Rayan to be. From there they then drove a horizontal tunnel in his direction. The soil, which consists of sand and rock, made their work difficult; rubble and earth kept falling down. Because of the danger of collapse, the rescuers partly made their way with their hands, inch by inch. Video camera footage showed the boy lying on his back. However, it was not possible to say whether he was alive. Hope still prevailed on Saturday afternoon, until at 9:33 p.m. the sad news reached the parents, who had been waiting in an ambulance next to the shaft.
Since then, condolences have been pouring in from all over the world. “An entire country tried to save Rayan. They tried everything,” Pope Francis said after the weekly Angelus prayer, praising the rescue operation as an expression of charity. French President Emmanuel Macron sent his condolences from Paris.
The tragic death in Morocco is reminiscent of the two-year-old Spanish boy Julen. Three years ago, near the Spanish city of Málaga, he fell 70 meters into the 25 centimeter wide borehole of an illegally constructed well. After one of the most complicated and extensive rescue operations in the history of Spain, only the body could be recovered after 13 days. In the poor north of Morocco, too, the authorities had been criticized for doing too little against the many illegal wells.
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