A five-year-old boy trapped for three days down a remote Afghan village well died moments after being pulled out alive, officials said Friday, IgbereTV reports.
The child, named Haidar, slipped Tuesday to the bottom of a well being dug in Shokak, a parched village in Zabul province, around 400 kilometres (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.
Zabul police spokesman Zabiullah Jawhar told AFP that 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 Haji Abdul Hadi, told AFP the boy fell down the well when he was trying to “help” adults dig a new borehole in the drought-ravaged village
