Spain: DNA sample found for 2-year-old missing in borehole
MADRID (AP) — Spanish rescuers working against the clock to find a 2-year-old boy who’s been missing for three days say they have found DNA samples of the boy confirming his parents’ account that he had fallen into a narrow borehole more than 100 meters (328 feet) deep.
Jose Rosello, the father of toddler Julen Rosello, has said that the family had no doubt that the boy fell into the borehole after walking away from his parents, who were preparing a countryside lunch Sunday near Totalan, a town northeast of Malaga.
Adults can’t enter the waterhole, which has a diameter narrower than 25 centimeters (10 inches).
Emergency teams said the hair samples of the boy, extracted from soil inside the shaft, suggested the toddler may be trapped inside but at a deeper section than machinery and surveillance equipment have so far been able to reach.
The government’s representative in the Malaga province, Maria Gamez, said the boy’s hair samples gave rescuers “scientific evidence that the minor is there.”
She also said that workers were still flattening areas near the borehole to allow heavy boring machinery to dig a side horizontal tunnel to reach the shaft.
Emergency workers have been unable to pass through the 73-meter mark of the shaft, blocked by an accumulation of hardened soil and rocks. They expect to be able to reach the deepest part of the shaft from the side tunnel in “24 to 48 hours.”
“We are not going to give up,” Jose Rosello told a scrum of reporters at the scene Wednesday. “We have the hope that an angel is going to show up for my son to come out alive.”
A private boring company has been summoned from Sweden to dig the new tunnel while miners from northern Spain have been working since Tuesday to manually dig the last part of the gallery.
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