TRIBUTES HAVE BEEN paid to a five-year-old boy found dead at the bottom of a well in Morocco in a tragic end to a five-day rescue operation.
The ordeal of Rayan Oram since he fell down the 32-metre well on Tuesday gained global attention and sparked an outpouring of sympathy online from across the world.
“The fall of a child who reminded the whole world of the values of humanity,” read one Moroccan newspaper headline, while others described the “tragic epilogue” that had brought “sadness and shock”.
The funeral is to be held tomorrow, provincial council head Abderahim Bouazza said.
Morocco’s royal cabinet said the King of Morocco Mohammed VI called the boy’s parents after his tragic accident.
Pope Francis, while mourning the loss of Rayan, praised the “beautiful” sight of “how all the people gathered together” to try to save a child.
“Our hearts broke last night,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a condolence message to King Mohammed.
French President Emmanuel Macron said: “I want to say to the family of little Rayan and to the Moroccan people that we share your pain.”
“We all of us had been holding out hope that little Rayan would make it,” Moroccan-American novelist Laila Lalami wrote on Twitter. “This is all so tragic.”
Throughout the major digging operation to extricate Rayan from the bottom of the well shaft, authorities had cautioned that they did not know whether he was alive.
The shaft, just 45 centimetres across, was too narrow for the boy to be reached directly, and widening it was deemed too risky – so earth-movers dug a wide slope into the hill to reach him from the side.
Thousands of people had gathered to watch the rescue beside the giant pit, singing songs to urge on the diggers, who worked through the nights under floodlights.
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