Four Colombian children who were missing for six weeks alone in the Amazon jungle after a plane crash have been found alive – and malnourished but otherwise healthy.
The siblings, Lesly, 13, Soleiny, nine, Tien Noriel, four, and baby Cristin who had his first birthday while lost in the jungle, had been travelling in a light aircraft on May 1 when it crashed.
The accident killed everyone else on board, the children's mother Magdalena Mucutui Valencia, the pilot and an indigenous leader.
But when the wreckage of the plane was found after weeks of hunting not only were the children not found dead alongside the adults, there was part-eaten fruit that suggested they had all survived.
That sparked a huge hunt across miles of dense and remote Amazon rainforest. There was false hope late last month when the country's President Gustavo Petro mistakenly said they were safe only to retract his statement and say there was just evidence they might still be alive.
But the rescue efforts intensified and yesterday delivered the news the country, and the watching world, had hoped for.
'It is a joy for the whole country,' Petro Tweeted.
'They were alone, they themselves achieved an example of total survival which will remain in history.'
The siblings, members of the Huitoto Indigenous group, are dehydrated, malnourished and bitten by insects but are otherwise healthy, rescuers said.
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