On Friday, Moroccan rescuers raced against the clock to save a small child who had been stranded in a deep hole for nearly three days, in an operation that has gripped the kingdom, with hundreds of millions watching live broadcasts with bated breath. As dusk set on Tuesday, relief operations for five-year-old Rayan, who had fallen down a 32-metre (100-foot) deep well, ramped up, with diggers digging out soil under floodlights to make a hole adjacent to the constricted shaft. The drilling has reached 27 meters (88 feet) in the village of Bab Berred in Morocco’s rural northern region of Chefchaouen, with “the hope of reaching 32 meters (105 feet) in the next few hours,” according to Morocco’s MAP news agency. On Friday, a Moroccan official said that rescuers had reached the “most critical point” in their efforts to save the life of a young boy stuck at the bottom of a well. Rayan has been trapped in a 32-meter-deep dry well in the farming village of Igran in the northern Chefchaouen province since Tuesday midday, despite rescue operations that have lasted 72 hours. “There’s only a bit more before we start making the horizontal hole,” Al-Tamrani remarked. “This stage is the most complex in the drilling process,” he continued, “since a team will descend to the bottom of the hole.”
