SHOKAKA (AFP) – A five-year-old boy trapped for three days down a remote Afghan village well died minutes after being pulled out on Friday.
The child, named Haidar, on Tuesday slipped and fell to the bottom of a well being dug in Shokak, a parched village in Zabul province, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) southwest of the capital Kabul.
“With great sorrow, young Haidar is separated from us forever,” said Taliban interior ministry senior adviser Anas Haqqani, in a tweet echoed by several of his colleagues.
“This is another day of mourning and grief for our country.”
Haidar was buried later in the day, his small grave covered by a mound of gravel and marked by a ribbon of white cloth.
Zabul police spokesman Zabiullah Jawhar told AFP Haidar was clinging to life when rescuers reached him.
“In the first minutes after the rescue operation was completed, he was breathing, and the medical team gave him oxygen,” he said.
“When the medical team tried to carry him to the helicopter, he lost his life.”
The operation comes around two weeks after a similar attempt to rescue a boy from a Moroccan well gripped the world — but ended with the child found dead.
Haidar’s grandfather, 50-year-old Hajji Abdul Hadi, told AFP the boy fell down the well when he was trying to “help” adults dig a borehole in the drought-ravaged village.
Officials said he fell to the bottom of the narrow 25-meter (80-foot) shaft, then was pulled by rope to within about 10 meters of the surface before getting stuck.
A large rock blocked the final few meters, which workers used pickaxes to break through on Friday morning.
The operation employed similar engineering to the rescue attempt in Morocco earlier this month, when a boy fell down a 32-meter well and was pulled out dead five days later.
The ordeal of “little Rayan” gained global attention and sparked an outpouring of sympathy online, with the Arabic Twitter hashtag #SaveRayan trending.