All four missing children have been found alive more than five weeks after a small plane crashed in the Colombian rainforest in the south of the South American country. “A joy for the whole country,” said Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The siblings – aged 13, nine, four and one – suffered an accident on May 1. The children were found by soldiers near the crash site.
The siblings had crashed in a Cessna 206 propeller plane in the Caquetá department in the south of the country. Small private planes are often the only way to cover longer distances in the impassable area. The children’s mother, the pilot and an indigenous leader were killed in the accident. In searching for the children, the soldiers found shoes, diapers, hair bows, purple scissors, a baby bottle, a shelter of leaves and branches, and half-eaten fruit.
Searching for clues in the dense rainforest
With the help of the found objects and traces, the soldiers were able to reconstruct the path the children had traveled so far. Accordingly, they initially removed four kilometers to the west of the crash site. Then they apparently ran into an obstacle and turned north. The rainforest in the region is very dense, which made searching for the missing people much more difficult. Moreover, it rains almost non-stop.
The children – three girls and a boy – belong to an indigenous community themselves and their knowledge of the region may have helped them survive in the jungle after the crash. Her grandmother Fátima Valencia especially trusted her eldest sister. “She was always like her mother, she took the others to the forest,” she recently said on the radio station La FM. “She knows the plants and fruits. We indigenous people learn from an early age which are edible and which are not.”
The case is reminiscent of the German-Peruvian Juliane Koepcke, who survived a plane crash in the Peruvian rainforest in 1971 and was rescued ten days later. Because her parents were biologists who did research in the Amazon, the then 17-year-old knew the area and was able to make her way to a river, where she was eventually found by forest workers.
Father fled from guerrilla group
According to media reports, the children in Colombia were on their way with their mother to their father, who had fled the region after continued threats from a splinter group of the FARC guerrilla organization. Although the security situation has improved following the 2016 peace agreement between the government and the FARC, parts of the South American country are still controlled by illegal groups. Indigenous peoples, social activists and environmentalists in particular are repeatedly targeted by criminal gangs.
Source: Krone
I am Wallace Jones, an experienced journalist. I specialize in writing for the world section of Today Times Live. With over a decade of experience, I have developed an eye for detail when it comes to reporting on local and global stories. My passion lies in uncovering the truth through my investigative skills and creating thought-provoking content that resonates with readers worldwide.
