Over two weeks after the plane carrying them crashed in the Colombian Amazon jungle, three kids and a newborn have apparently been found alive.
Seven persons were on board the Cessna 206 when it issued a mayday call due to engine failure in the early hours of May 1 while flying between Araracuara, in the Amazonas region, and San Jose del Guaviare, a city in the Guaviare province.
Inside the plane, the bodies of three individuals who perished in the disaster, including the pilot, were discovered.
One of the dead passengers, Ranoque Mucutuy, was the mother of the four children, who are of the indigenous Huitoto ethnicity.
However, the four children, aged 13, nine and four, as well as an 11-month-old baby, managed to survive the impact.
Colombian authorities have since deployed more than 100 soldiers with sniffer dogs to search for the children, who have been missing for 17 days.
On Wednesday, Colombia’s President Gustav Petro tweets that the children had been found after ‘arduous search efforts’ by the military. ‘A joy for the country,’ he said.
But he was later contradicted by military sources, who said the children had not yet been found.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Colombian military said search efforts had been stepped up after a ‘shelter built in an improvised way with sticks and branches’ had been found.
Photos of the search also showed scissors, a hair band, and discarded fruit eaten by the children scattered on the jungle floor.
Local media later reported that although the military had not confirmed finding the children, contact between them and a government agency had been made.
Avianline Charters, owner of the crashed aircraft, said that one of its pilots in the search area was told the children had been found and that they ‘were being transported by boat down river and that they were all alive’.
However, the company also admitted that ’there has been no official confirmation’ that the children were safely out of danger, and that thunderstorms in the area still posed a risk to them reaching safety.
The thick rainforest and extremely isolated location of the crash hampered search efforts, with military planes and helicopters assisting the search teams on the ground.
One helicopter played out a recorded message from their grandmother in the Huitoto language telling the children to stop moving through the rainforest.
Colombian authorities have not yet given the cause of the plane crash but the country’s disaster response body said the pilot had reported problems with the engine minutes before the plane disappeared from radar systems.