Morocco mourns on Sunday the death of little Rayan, stuck for five days at the bottom of a deep well in a poor region in the north of the kingdom, a human drama amplified by social networks which has sparked an avalanche of emotion around the world .
• Read also: Morocco: little Rayan, who fell into a well, died
The date of the funeral has not been announced, but according to Muslim tradition, the funeral of the five-year-old boy should take place quickly, probably as early as Sunday. No official information has filtered on a possible autopsy.
“Tragic epilogue… Sadness and shock in Morocco… The fall of a child who reminded the whole world of the values of humanity”, commented the Sunday press.
A sign of the strong emotion caused by the tragedy, it was the royal cabinet which announced the death of the child on Saturday evening.
In an official statement, King Mohammed VI offered his condolences to the parents.
The race against the clock conducted for five days by the rescuers had been followed live by countless Internet users.
And as soon as the death was announced, tributes on social networks poured in from all over the world, from neighboring and rival Algeria to France or the United States, in all languages.
“Little angel, you fought until the end, a hero”, greeted a surfer on Twitter. “He will have succeeded where leaders and the media have failed. He brought people together around him,” added another internet user.
“Rayan’s courage will be remembered and will continue to inspire us. The dedication of the Moroccan people and the rescue workers as well,” wrote AC Milan Algerian international Ismaël Bennacer in a tweet accompanied by a drawing of a child rising in the sky hanging from a heart-shaped balloon in the colors from Morocco.
“We had all kept hope that little Rayan would come out of it. All this is so tragic”, also reacted on Twitter the Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami, while French President Emmanuel Macron said on Facebook “to the family of little Rayan and to the Moroccan people that we share their pain”.
A dissonant voice though. A netizen lamented a “dystopian world in which all Arab nations are moved by the rescue of a child in Morocco while dozens die every day of starvation or under bombardments in Yemen, Syria”, before adding: ” NB: All lives matter”.
Rayan had accidentally fallen on Tuesday into a 32-meter dry well, narrow and difficult to access, dug near the family home in the village of Ighrane, in the province of Chefchaouen (north).
Entering a horizontal breach on Saturday afternoon, the rescuers had continued their work centimeter by centimeter, digging by hand to avoid any landslide.
A chief rescuer, Abdelhadi Tamrani, said on Saturday morning that images sent by an inspection camera showed the child “lying on his side, from behind” and that it was “impossible to say” if he was alive. . However, the manager said he had “very high hopes”.
The rescuers had tried to send oxygen and water through tubes and bottles down to Rayan, without certainty that he could use them.
As soon as the drama broke out, thousands of supporters came running in a sign of solidarity and camped on the spot, in this mountainous area of the Rif, at an altitude of nearly 700 meters.
As the outcome approached, in a feverish atmosphere before it became dismal, the crowd prayed and sang.
A volunteer driller, Ali Sahraoui, a fifties who dug the earth with his hands during the rescue operation, became for a time the “hero” of social networks.
This accident echoed a tragedy that occurred in early 2019 in Andalusia (Spain), where two-year-old Julen died after falling into a well 25 centimeters in diameter and more than 100 meters deep.
His body was found after 13 days of research on an exceptional scale.
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca