King Mohammed of Morocco has offered his condolences in a phone call with the parents of a five-year-old boy, who was found dead yesterday at the bottom of a 30 metre well he had fallen down earlier this week.
Emergency crews found the boy, named Rayan, at the bottom of a well in a tragic end to a painstaking five-day rescue operation that gripped the nation.
The ordeal of "little Rayan" gained global attention and sparked an outpouring of sympathy online, with the Arabic hashtag #SaveRayan trending.
Throughout the operation to extricate him from the bottom of the well shaft, authorities had cautioned that they did not know whether he was alive.
Morocco's royal cabinet announced yesterday that he had been found dead.
"Following the tragic accident which cost the life of the child Rayan Oram, His Majesty King Mohammed VI called the parents of the boy who died after falling down the well," a statement from the royal court said.
By mid-afternoon yesterday, rescue crews, using bulldozers and front-end loaders, had excavated the surrounding red earth down to the level where the boy was trapped, and drill teams began creating a horizontal tunnel to reach him from the side.
But progress slowed to a snail's pace as the drill teams worked by hand to avoid any vibrations that might bring the brittle soil down on the stricken child, local authorities said.
The family has yet to announce the date of the funeral, but according to Muslim tradition it must take place soon, in principle as early as today.
Tributes poured in in the wake of the news that the rescue efforts had failed to recover Rayan alive.
Thousands of people had gathered and even camped in solidarity around the site in recent days.
Some had applauded to encourage the rescuers, sang religious songs or prayed.
Workers had tried to get oxygen and water down to the child but it was not clear whether he was able to use them.
"I keep up hope that my child will get out of the well alive," Rayan's father had told public television 2M on Friday evening. "I thank everyone involved and those supporting us in Morocco and elsewhere."
He said earlier in the week that he had been repairing the well when the boy fell in.
The shaft, just 45cm across, was too narrow for the boy to be reached directly, and widening it was deemed too risky - so diggers dug a wide slope into the hill to reach him from the side.
The operation made the landscape resemble a construction site, and red-helmeted civil defence personnel had at times been suspended by rope, as if on a cliff face.
