Four indigenous children survived a plane crash in the Amazon that killed three adults and then wandered alone in the jungle for 40 days before being found alive by Colombian soldiers.
Officials in the South American country announced their rescue on Friday, bringing a happy ending to a checkered saga as searchers frantically combed through the jungle looking for the youngsters.
By Saturday, as the children received treatment at a military hospital in the capital Bogota, it was unclear how the siblings, including an 11-month-old baby, managed to survive.
President Gustavo Petro celebrated the news upon his return from Cuba, where he signed a ceasefire with representatives of the National Liberation Army rebel group. He is expected to meet the children this Saturday.
Petro described them as an “example of survival” and predicted that their saga “will remain in history.”
“The children are fine”
Damaris Mucutuy, the children’s aunt, told a radio station that “the children are fine” despite being found with signs of dehydration and insect bites. Mucutuy, who arrived at the hospital in the early morning with other relatives, said the children had been offered mental health services.
An air force video showed a helicopter using ropes to lift the youths because they couldn’t land in the dense rainforest where they were found. The plane flew into the dim light, the air force said it was headed for San José del Guaviare, a small town on the edge of the jungle.
No details were released about how the four siblings aged 13, 9, 4 and 11 months managed to survive on their own for so long, despite belonging to an indigenous group living in the remote region.
On Friday, the army tweeted images showing a group of soldiers and volunteers posing with the children, who were wrapped in thermal blankets. One of the soldiers brought a bottle to the lips of the youngest child.
The accident occurred in the early hours of May 1, when a single-propeller Cessna plane with six passengers and a pilot declared an emergency due to engine failure.
The small plane disappeared from radar a short time later and a frantic search for survivors began. Two weeks after the crash, on May 16, a search team found the plane in a thick patch of rainforest and recovered the bodies of the three adults on board, but the young children were nowhere to be found.
Sensing that they might be alive, the Colombian army intensified the search and brought 150 soldiers with dogs to the area. Dozens of volunteers from indigenous tribes also helped in the search.
During the search, in an area where visibility is severely limited by fog and thick foliage, soldiers in helicopters dropped boxes of food into the jungle, hoping it would help support the children. Planes flying over the jungle dropped flares to help search teams on the ground overnight, and rescuers used loudspeakers that played a recorded message from the brothers’ grandmother, telling them to stay in one place.
Rumors about the whereabouts of the children also surfaced, and on May 18 the president tweeted that the children had been found. He later deleted the post, claiming that a government agency had misinformed him.
The group of four children was traveling with their mother from the Amazonian town of Araracuara to San José del Guaviare when the plane crashed.
They are members of the Huitoto people, and authorities said the older children in the group had some knowledge of how to survive in the rainforest.
On Friday, after confirming the children had been rescued, the president said he had for some time believed the children were rescued by one of the nomadic tribes who still roam the remote stretch of jungle where the plane went down and have little contact with the authorities.
But Petro added that the children were first found by one of the rescue dogs that the soldiers brought into the jungle.
Authorities did not say how far the children were from the crash site when they were found. But teams had been searching within a 4.5-kilometer (nearly 3-mile) radius of where the plane plummeted to the forest floor.
As the search progressed, the soldiers found small clues in the jungle that led them to believe the children were still alive, including a set of footprints, a baby bottle, diapers and pieces of fruit that appeared to have been bitten by humans. “The jungle saved them,” Petro said. “They are children of the jungle, and now they are also children of Colombia.”
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