Rescatan sin vida al pequeño Rayan después de cinco días atrapado en el pozo

Rayan, the Moroccan child trapped since Tuesday in a narrow well 32 metres deep and 45 centimetres wide in the town of Inghran, located about 70 kilometres from Chaouen, in the north of the country, has been rescued lifeless this Saturday after an exhaustive special operation that began at 14.00 hours after several complications.

The five-year-old boy died hours before being rescued. Authorities lowered an oxygen and water tube to the boy on Thursday, which were kept until the end of the rescue, and lowered a camera to observe his condition and monitor his progress. In these images, Rayan appeared to be still breathing, but in the end he was unable to stay alive.

An ambulance was waiting at the entrance to the borehole, where his parents, Khaled Oram and Wassima Khersheesh, have been waiting since this morning and have already received a phone call from King Mohammed VI. The Moroccan Royal Court has confirmed the death of little Rayan and expressed its condolences to the family.

Rayan fell into a well near the family's home on 1 February last Tuesday. His father claimed at the time that the surface was covered with a barrel, but that Rayan would have pushed it aside. In any case, as soon as the alarm was raised, the authorities started working.

The type of soil in the area, characterised by a mixture of sand and unstable rock, made the rescue operation difficult from the outset. In fact, excavation had to be suspended several times in the last four days to avoid a landslide.

The first option was to hammer on the shaft down which the child fell. An unsuccessful attempt led the authorities to drill a parallel well and then to approach the site where Rayan is located. A similar operation to that deployed by the firefighters of the Provincial Consortium of Malaga to rescue Julen. In fact, the corps offered Morocco to support the rescue work. 

During the final stages of the drilling, the operation encountered this setback, which prolonged the rescue work for three hours in a delicate operation in which a small crack could have caused a landslide.

The head of the rescue monitoring and surveillance committee, Abdelhadi Tamrani, told the media in statements reported by the EFE news agency that the operation was made up of eleven people, from drilling experts to Civil Protection personnel and topographers, who worked from inside the horizontal tunnel excavated to reach the child.

A Royal Gendarmerie helicopter has been on standby since Saturday, in case it was necessary to transfer Rayan, as well as an ambulance. In a statement issued in his capacity as secretary general of the Istiqlal (Independence Party), the Minister of Equipment, Transport and Logistics, Nizar Baraka, said that the authorities had used "all possible resources and means" to carry out the operation.

A dramatic end to an event that has shocked not only Morocco, but the whole world. Hundreds of people gathered in the vicinity of the site, despite the authorities' perimeter closure, and cheered the rescue operation with chants and prayers. Social networks have been flooded with messages with the hashtag #SaveRayan, and thousands of users have shared images of the little boy. Morocco has thrown itself into the case and half the world has been following the evolution of the rescue.