Morocco mourns ‘little Rayan’ after well rescue bid fails
Published: 04:02 PM,Feb 06,2022 | EDITED : 08:02 PM,Feb 06,2022
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IGHRANE, Morocco: Morocco was in shock on Sunday after emergency crews found a five-year-old boy dead at the bottom of a well in a tragic end to a five-day rescue operation that gripped the nation and the world.
The ordeal of “little Rayan” since he fell down the 32-metre well on Tuesday gained global attention and sparked an outpouring of sympathy online, with the Arabic Twitter hashtag #SaveRayan trending.
“The fall of a child who reminded the whole world of the values of humanity,” read one Moroccan newspaper headline, while others bemoaned the “tragic epilogue” that had brought “sadness and shock”.
The boy’s father said he had been repairing the well when the boy fell in, close to the family home in the village of Ighrane in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. “Little angel, you fought until the end, a hero”, said one Twitter user called Anouar, while another said “he has brought people together around him”.
Throughout the major digging operation to extricate him from the bottom of the well shaft, authorities had cautioned that they did not know whether he was alive.
The shaft, just 45 centimetres across, was too narrow for the boy to be reached directly, and widening it was deemed too risky — so earth-movers dug a wide slope into the hill to reach him from the side. The operation made the landscape resemble a construction site, and red-helmeted civil defence personnel had at times been suspended by rope, as if on a cliff face. — AFP
The ordeal of “little Rayan” since he fell down the 32-metre well on Tuesday gained global attention and sparked an outpouring of sympathy online, with the Arabic Twitter hashtag #SaveRayan trending.
“The fall of a child who reminded the whole world of the values of humanity,” read one Moroccan newspaper headline, while others bemoaned the “tragic epilogue” that had brought “sadness and shock”.
The boy’s father said he had been repairing the well when the boy fell in, close to the family home in the village of Ighrane in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. “Little angel, you fought until the end, a hero”, said one Twitter user called Anouar, while another said “he has brought people together around him”.
Throughout the major digging operation to extricate him from the bottom of the well shaft, authorities had cautioned that they did not know whether he was alive.
The shaft, just 45 centimetres across, was too narrow for the boy to be reached directly, and widening it was deemed too risky — so earth-movers dug a wide slope into the hill to reach him from the side. The operation made the landscape resemble a construction site, and red-helmeted civil defence personnel had at times been suspended by rope, as if on a cliff face. — AFP