In a miraculous story of survival, four children—including an 11-month-old infant—have reportedly turned up alive after escaping a plane crash and surviving 40 days on their own in the Amazon rainforest.
The four children survived a crash in Colombia that killed three other people, including their mother, on May 1. When authorities arrived at the scene to survey the wreckage of the downed Cessna 206, they found the children missing, kicking off a frantic search to find them.
On Friday night, after a whirlwind of conflicting reports about their survival, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said the children are now in safe hands.
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“A joy for the whole country!” Petro wrote. “Four children who were lost for 40 days in the Columbian jungle have turned up alive.”
In photos posted by Petro and the country's military forces, rescuers tend to the missing children as they sit on tarps on the jungle floor.
A video shared by the Colombian Ministry of Defense shows military personnel lifting the children into a helicopter as it hovered over the forest in the dead of night. The children later arrived at a hospital in the capital of Bogotá to receive medical treatment.
The four children’s father and grandparents have since reunited with them, CNN en Español reported.
“It is a gift for Colombia,” Petro told local media. He said that the combined efforts of military personnel and indigenous communities made the rescue possible
After the plane crash that killed the children’s mother along with a pilot and another passenger, Colombian military personnel and local indigenous communities set out to find them. Soldiers deployed sniffer dogs and military aircraft to track down the lost kids, including a helicopter that strafed the jungle canopy while playing a recorded message from the children’s grandmother to stay put.
The children were all from Indigenous Huitoto people, who live in the border region of southeastern Colombia and northern Peru. In addition to the infant, their group included a 13-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 4-year-old.
The final confirmation of their survival follows weeks of mixed messages. On May 14, Petro prematurely tweeted that searchers had found the children alive, citing information from the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare. But after defense sources disputed the finding to a Colombian newspaper, he took the post down and issued an apology.
Reports that the children had been located continued to percolate, however.
A plane operator that owned the crashed plane released a statement saying one of its pilots had heard news of the children’s survival from residents when they landed in the village of Cachiporro, not far from the crash site. And indigenous radio stations reported that the children had been secured and would arrive by river in the village.
Following the rescue, the children’s grandmother said that the oldest child was used to caring for their younger siblings while their mother was away—a skill that may have saved them all.
"I am very grateful, and to mother earth as well, that they were set free," she said, according to the BBC.
Petro stressed that the children would continue to receive medical treatment.
“The most important thing now is what the doctors say, they have been lost for 40 days, their health condition must have been stressed,” Petro said at a press conference. “We need to check their mental state too.”
