An 11-month-old baby has been found alive in the Colombian Amazon forest near the site of a plane crash that occurred there over two weeks ago.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced this in a tweet made on Wednesday, stating that the development was a thing of “joy for the country.”
The child, alongside three other children — a 13-year-old, a 9-year-old, and a 4-year-old — are said to have been found after intensive search efforts by the Colombian military.
On the 1st of May, the plane carrying the four children and three other people — the children’s parents and the pilot — between Araracuara, in Amazonas province, and San Jose del Guaviare, a city in Guaviare province, had suffered an engine failure.
According to Colombia’s disaster response body, the pilot had reported problems with the engine before the plane suddenly disappeared from radars.
While the three adults, including the pilot, died in the ensuing plane crash, it was suspected that the four children, including the 11-month-old baby, survived the crash.
Up to 100 armed military personnel had been deployed with sniffer dogs to search the forest area for the children. The bodies of the pilot and two adults were eventually found on Monday and Tuesday.
Earlier on in the search, the Colombian military had announced that they would intensify their search efforts after a “shelter built in an improvised way with sticks and branches” was discovered in the forest, leading them to believe that there were survivors.
Photographs released by the military showed scissors, shoes, hair ties, a baby’s drinking bottle, and half-eaten pieces of fruit among branches and twigs scattered on the ground in the jungle.
Tagged “Operation Hope”, the search for the surviving children was made difficult by giant trees in the jungle that is about 40 meters tall, as well as by inclement weather conditions marked by heavy rainfall.
Military choppers were used to aid the search efforts, one of which blasted out a recorded message from the children’s grandmother in their native language asking them to remain in one part of the jungle so they could be easily located.
