The royal palace announced Saturday that a five-year-old boy died after being trapped in a deep water well in Morocco for four days.
Moroccan King Mohammed VI released a statement expressing his condolences for the parents of the boy.
After a long operation that captured global attention, Rayan was pulled from the boy’s body by rescuers Saturday night.
The boy was wrapped in a yellow towel by an Associated Press reporter who saw him emerge from a tunnel he had been digging for the rescue.
Khaled Oram, Wassima Khersheesh and their son emerged from the ambulance. His story was a sensation.
According to the palace statement, the king was closely monitoring the rescue efforts of local authorities and “instructing officials that all means were necessary to dig the boy from the well and bring him back to his parents.”
The King praised the rescuers and the community that helped Rayan’s family.
Many villagers and others gathered to witness the rescue operation.
Online messages of support and concern for the boy poured in from around the world as rescue efforts dragged on for four days.
They used a rope and a camera to monitor the boy’s condition. Abdelhadi Temrani (head of rescue committee) stated Saturday morning that it was impossible to assess the child’s health at this point. We pray that the child is still alive.
Rayan fell into a 32-metre well located outside his home in the village of Ighran in Morocco’s mountainous northern Chefchaouen province on Tuesday evening.
Three days ago, the search teams used bulldozers and excavators to dig a parallel ditch. They began digging a horizontal tunnel on Friday to reach the boy trapped in the ditch.
Morocco’s MAP news agency reported that experts in topographical engineering were consulted.
Temrani, speaking to local television 2M, said Saturday that rescuers had just two metres left to dig to reach the hole where the boy had been trapped.
He stated that they encountered hard rock along their route and had to be cautious not to cause any landslides. It took five hours to remove the rock. The digging was slow, and the work was done carefully to avoid cracks below the ground. This could have been dangerous for the child’s life as well as rescue workers.
Because of the possibility that the soil around the well might collapse, the work was particularly difficult.
There are 500 inhabitants in this village. Many of the wells are used for irrigation of the cannabis crop, which is the main source income for many people living in the remote and poor Rif Mountains of Morocco. Many of these wells are protected.
The exact circumstances of how the boy fell in the well were unclear.
Moroccans used social media to express their support for Rayan’s survival and use the hashtag #SaveRayan. The hashtag brought international attention to the rescue efforts.