Four children from eleven months to 13 years old, survivors of a plane crash and found 40 days later in the Colombian Amazon jungle. The story has everything of a fictional series, however it is very real. Lesly, Soleiny, Tien Noriel and Cristin were taken out of the jungle on Friday, June 9. The outcome of a story followed since the beginning of May by Colombians.
May 1: Plane crashes with seven people on board
It all starts with an air disaster. A Cessna 206 type aircraft, which was carrying seven passengers, including four children, disappeared from radar on May 1 in the vicinity of San José del Guaviare -in southern Colombia- where it was headed.
May 16: the device found, the children not found
The aircraft was found two weeks later, on May 16, upright with its nose crushed to the ground in dense vegetation. Three bodies were recovered by the emergency services, those of the pilot, the mother of the children and a leader of the Uitoto indigenous community, to which all the passengers belonged. More than 100 soldiers accompanied by sniffer dogs and dozens of natives then begin to search for the children.
Coming from the Uitoto indigenous group, the children are used to life in the jungle and know how to survive there, according to their relatives. Still, this environment is very hostile: jaguars, pumas, snakes, and other predators roam there. The region is also an area of strong influence for the FARC dissidents, an armed group with which peace talks recently broke off.
May 18: President announces they have been found, then retracts
However, the hope of finding the children alive, if it dwindles as the days go by, is fueled by the discovery in the jungle of personal effects, as well as a bottle and half-eaten fruit. A “makeshift shelter made of sticks and branches” had also led rescuers to believe there would be at least one survivor.
On May 18, almost 3 weeks after the tragedy, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced the safe and sound discovery of the four children, “a joy for the country.” But a few hours later, the head of state retracts and indicates that he continues the search to find the children.
“I have decided to delete the tweet because the information provided (…) could not be confirmed. I am sorry for what happened,” he wrote on his Twitter account.
A few days later, the army claimed to be “very close” to the missing children.
June 8: A Lost Search Dog
On Thursday, June 8, a military dog that was participating in the search got lost in thick vegetation. Wilson, a six-year-old Belgian shepherd, participated along with dozens of other tracking dogs from the beginning of the search for military operations to try to find the little brothers. It was he who had found Cristin’s bottle, the youngest of 11 months, among the thick vegetation.
According to the Army, “one of the hypotheses” about the disappearance of the dog is that “due to the complexity of the terrain, the humidity and the adverse weather conditions, it would have been disoriented.”
Behind this bad news, the rescuers also announced that they had “found footprints that could be those of the children, near footprints that could be those of the dog”, without specifying whether the second hypothesis would indicate that the animal and the children were walking together. side.
June 9: the children finally found by the emergency services
40 days after the accident, Lesly, Soleiny, Tien Noriel and Cristin are found by the rescuers of this “operation hope”. “Very weak and dehydrated”, they are transferred by plane and helicopter to the city of San José del Guaviare to later be transferred on Saturday by medical plane to Bogotá. Upon arrival, they were evacuated on stretchers and loaded into various ambulances.
Rescuers found the brothers about 5 km west of the crash site. “They are weak. Let the doctors make their prognosis,” President Gustavo Petro told the press.
According to the army, the rescuers covered, in more than a month, about 2,656 km in this impenetrable jungle.
Source: BFM TV
