By Laura Marie Gehrmann, René Garzke and Elisabeth Steinbrecher
It’s a miracle! After 40 days, four children missing after a plane crash in Colombia’s jungle have been found alive.
They are 13, 9, 4 and 1 years old! For weeks they wandered around in the dense rainforest, building shelters and subsisting on fruit.
After a tedious search involving hundreds of soldiers and indigenous people, the children are finally safe. At 12:27 a.m. they landed at the military airport in Colombia’s capital, Bogota.
On Friday, new tracks were discovered that ultimately led to the children, said Andrés Chaparro from the general command of the Colombian army.
“The children were found very weak and severely dehydrated. The children say they ate the fruit the jungle gave them and the contents of survival kits they found,” the captain said.
︎ According to the authorities, it contained water, sandwiches, biscuits, serums and a lighter, among other things.
This photo shows the four children wrapped in thermal blankets. Plus their rescuers: soldiers and indigenous men who were involved in the search
Photo: picture alliance/dpa/Colombia’s Armed Force Press Office/AP | Uncredited
Apparently they served their purpose of feeding the minors and were able to leave a trail in the forest that served as a clue to their rescuers.
The children – three girls and a boy – were alone when search parties found them and are now receiving medical attention. Grandmother Fatima Valencia attributed the children’s survival to the “warlike” nature of eldest sister Lesly, 13.
The crash of the small plane was about six weeks ago
Photo: Colombia’s Armed Forces Press Office/dpa
“She was always like her mother, she took the others to the forest,” said the grandmother recently on the La FM radio station. “She knows the plants and fruits. We indigenous people learn from an early age which ones are edible and which are not.”
► The siblings crashed on May 1 in the Cessna 206 propeller plane in the Caquetá department in southern Colombia. Her mother, the pilot and an indigenous leader died in the accident. Private small planes are often the only way to cover longer distances in the impassable region.
A major search operation involving 160 soldiers and 70 indigenous people was launched in hopes of rescuing 13-year-old Lesly, nine-year-old Soleiny, four-year-old Tien Noriel and 11-month-old Cristin.
Rescuers found bitten fruit
On May 18, emergency services found shoes, diapers, hair ties, purple scissors, a baby bottle, and a makeshift shelter made of leaves and branches, as well as half-eaten fruit.
Using the objects and traces found, the soldiers were able to reconstruct the path the children had taken so far.
Accordingly, they initially removed from the crash site four kilometers to the west. Then they apparently met an obstacle and turned north. The rainforest in the region is very dense, which made finding the children extremely difficult. In addition, it rains almost non-stop.
The army used tracking dogs, helicopters and satellite images, among other things, for the massive search operation. In addition, 10,000 leaflets were dropped over the area calling on the children in Spanish and their indigenous language to stay where they are.
The siblings should find their way to the search parties with the help of visual and acoustic objects placed at strategic points.
Spotlights and their grandmother’s voice echoing through loudspeakers in the jungle should help lure the children to the right spots. The grandmother’s voice was transmitted in her indigenous language.