Morocco in suspense. Accidentally fallen into a deep well, a 5-year-old child, Rayan, has been stuck for more than thirty-six hours. Help is on site, in Chefchaouen in the north of the country, to try to extract the boy.
The child accidentally fell, this Tuesday, February 1 in the evening, to the bottom of a dry well 32 meters deep, narrow and difficult to access, dug not far from the family home. “In a moment of inattention, the little one fell into the well that I was repairing. I couldn’t sleep a wink all night,” Rayan’s father told Le360. Rescuers were able to deliver water and oxygen through tubes to Rayan, according to the MAP news agency.
Relief operations on the ground have intensified. The drilling work “reached more than 27 meters, with the hope of reaching 32 meters in the next few hours, before digging a horizontal gap of 3 meters between the hole and the well to recover the child”, a reported the MAP news agency.
A medical team was dispatched to the scene of the accident to “carry out initial examinations and resuscitation interventions for the child once”, added MAP. A gendarmerie helicopter is ready to evacuate the child to a nearby hospital. While the rescuers are supported by topographers also mobilized on site.
A country in turmoil
This accident has held the country in suspense for several hours. The direct broadcasts of several Moroccan media are followed minute by minute by hundreds of thousands of Internet users, hanging on to the fate of the child.
The hashtag #sauvezrayan (in Arabic) is still one of the main trends on Twitter in Morocco.
Moroccan international and PSG star Achraf Hakimi shared an illustration on Instagram, accompanied by two emojis: the broken heart and the folded hands of prayer. Algerian Riyad Mahrez, star of Manchester City, was not left out, sharing on Facebook a photo of Rayan lined with the hashtag #Stay Strong (Stay Strong).
The emotion is such that the inhabitants of the region flocked “in large numbers” to the scene of the tragedy, sometimes hampering the search for relief work. Because this accident echoes a tragedy that occurred in early 2019 in Spain.
In Andalusia, a 2-year-old child died after falling into an abandoned well 25 centimeters in diameter and more than 100 meters deep dug to find water. The body of little Julen had been found after thirteen days of research on an exceptional scale.