Little Rayan, the Moroccan child who died after falling to the bottom of a well, was buried on Monday near his village of Ighrane.
After a human tragedy that shook the world for five days, little Rayan, the Moroccan child who died after falling to the bottom of a well, was buried on Monday near his village, in a deprived region in the north of the kingdom. The funeral took place after the Muslim midday prayer in an old cemetery a few kilometers from the village of Ighrane where the accident took place, according to AFP journalists on the spot. An imam said the brief prayer in front of the family and audience before the burial.
After being extracted from the hole on Saturday evening, the remains of the 5-year-old boy, accompanied by his parents, were transported to the military hospital in Rabat to carry out an autopsy and determine the causes of death, according to local media.
See as well :Morocco in shock after the death of little Rayan
Rayan’s death triggered considerable emotion, amplified by social networks, in Morocco and around the world. “The silence is terrible this morning in the village. Everyone prayed that he would come out alive. Everyone cried,” a relative of the family told AFP the day after the macabre discovery. “The fall of a child reminded the world of the values of humanity,” commented the site of public television SNRT.
Rayan accidentally fell into a 32-meter dry well on Tuesday
Abroad, one of the strongest reactions came from the coach of the Algerian football team, Djamel Belmadi, who offered moving condolences to the family of little Rayan, at a time when relations between Algiers and Rabat are at their lowest.
“Our pain and our pain are great, but will never equal those of his parents and loved ones,” he wrote on the Algerian federation website, saying he was “upset”. In fact, the tragedy sparked in Algeria an avalanche of messages of compassion on the internet despite the political rivalry between the two enemy brothers from the Maghreb. A sign of the shock and emotion that gripped the kingdom, it was the royal cabinet that announced the death of the child on Saturday evening. King Mohammed VI himself called Rayan’s parents to offer his condolences, and they thanked, moved, the sovereign, the authorities and all the rescuers.
Work began on Sunday to fill in the relief tunnels drilled by the rescuers as well as the well. Everyone paid tribute to the tireless efforts of the rescuers whose race against time was followed live by countless Internet users. And as soon as the death was announced, tributes on social networks poured in from all over the world, in all languages.
“Little angel, you fought until the end, a hero”, greeted a surfer on Twitter. “He will have succeeded where leaders and the media have failed. He has brought people together around him,” opined another Internet user. Rayan had accidentally fallen on Tuesday into a 32-meter dry well, narrow and difficult to access, dug near the family home in Ighrane.
Entering a horizontal breach on Saturday, the rescuers had continued their work centimeter by centimeter, digging by hand to avoid any landslide.
The rescuers had tried to get oxygen and water to Rayan, without certainty that he could use them.
From the start of the drama, thousands of supporters had rushed in a sign of solidarity and camped on the spot, in this mountainous area of the Rif, at nearly 700 meters above sea level.
If the tragedy brought together Moroccans in a spirit of unity, several media on Monday denounced the proliferation and danger of clandestine and unsecured wells in this region which would be used to irrigate crops, including that of cannabis. They urged the authorities to fix it.
This accident echoed a tragedy that occurred in early 2019 in Andalusia (Spain), where two-year-old Julen died after falling into a well 25 centimeters in diameter and more than 100 meters deep.
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