Moroccan rescuers dig horizontal tunnel to free 5-year-old trapped in 32-meter well

Five days underground, and Rayan was still alive. The five-year-old had fallen into a well near Chefchaouen in northern Morocco on Tuesday, tumbling 32 meters down a shaft so narrow—just 45 centimeters wide at the opening—that no one could follow him down. By Saturday, rescuers had shifted strategy entirely. Instead of trying to descend the well itself, they were digging sideways, carving a horizontal tunnel through the earth toward the boy's location, reinforcing it with concrete tubes as they went. The work was slow, deliberate, and constantly threatened by the possibility of collapse.

The family discovered Rayan was missing when they heard him crying from below. A relative lowered a phone down the well shaft, its light and camera piercing the darkness, and found the boy at the bottom. "He was crying 'lift me up,'" the relative told Reuters. That muffled sound from the depths had been their first signal that something had gone terribly wrong. Now, five days later, hundreds of villagers had gathered on the hillside above the excavation site, waiting for word that the boy had been brought to the surface.

The rescue operation had become a round-the-clock effort involving mechanical diggers and teams of workers in helmets and high-visibility vests. They descended into a pit they had dug parallel to the original well, carrying stretchers, ropes, and tackle. The horizontal tunnel approach was born of necessity: the well's narrowing geometry made vertical rescue impossible. As the diggers pushed forward, they encountered rocks embedded between the trench and the well itself, slowing progress and adding to the physical difficulty of the work. Periodically, rescuers were ordered out of the tunnel to stabilize the earth, a precaution against the landslides that posed a constant threat to everyone involved.

Rayan had been supplied with water and oxygen through a tube lowered from above. Food had also been sent down, though it remained unclear whether the boy had eaten any of it. The region around Chefchaouen sits in hills that turn brutally cold in winter, and the five-year-old had now spent five nights in that darkness, in that cold, at the bottom of a well. His father stood watching the rescue efforts on Friday night, wrapped in a traditional hooded woollen robe against the chill, his voice barely audible as he spoke to those gathered. "People who love us are sparing no effort to save my child," he said—a statement that carried both gratitude and the weight of five days of waiting.

The concrete tubes being placed into the horizontal tunnel represented the operation's best hope for extraction. Once the tunnel reached the well, rescuers could use those tubes to create a safe passage, allowing them to reach Rayan and pull him up to the surface. The work was dangerous and uncertain, but it was the only path forward. As Saturday wore on, the diggers continued their careful, methodical push through the earth, while above them, the villagers kept their vigil.