Updated ,first published
Xaisomboun province, Laos: Rescue divers have found five villagers trapped for more than a week in a flooded Laos cave alive and in decent health, with efforts continuing overnight Wednesday to locate the remaining two.
The men had been missing since at least May 20 after going into the cave complex in the mountainous central province of Xaisomboun to fossick for gold. Families of the men told this masthead it had begun to rain early that day, and the group had been warned not to go “but they didn’t listen”.
Late on Wednesday afternoon, news reached the desperate relatives and villagers gathered at the staging ground at Phanchai Village that five of the men had been found.
“I came back here and the people were cheering,” said Mun Duang Somdi, the mother of one of the men who had been found. “I was very happy”.
A video posted by a Thai rescue group involved in the mission appeared to show the moment divers emerged from the water and discovered the trapped villagers. In the footage, the smiling villagers were sitting on a rock surrounded by floodwater.
“I’m still shaking. Our team made it happen,” Bounkham Luanglath of the Laos organisation Rescue Volunteer for People told the Associated Press in a voice message.
The mission to save the Laos Seven has been likened to the 2018 cave rescue of 12 children from the Wild Boars Thai soccer team, partly because of the length of time the men have been missing and the expertise required to find them. It has involved some of the same dive veterans of the earlier feat, including Finland’s Mikko Paasi and Thailand’s Norrased “Ben” Palasing.
But while five of the men in Laos have been found, they are not yet free. One man in frequent contact with the rescue team said it could be a more complex operation to extract the trapped people than it was in 2018.
Video posted from the rescue mission shows impossibly narrow spaces filled with muddied water, while it is a several kilometre trek up steep terrain to bring gear, supplies and help from the staging ground.
Despite an eighth man making it out of the cave before it became sealed off, authorities were not alerted to the incident until several days later. State-controlled Lao media reported this was because villagers were worried the matters of gold fossicking and wildlife hunting, which were “rarely discussed publicly”, could trigger punishment from the state.
It was only when their rescue efforts failed, according to the Laotian Times, that they passed the information to an “influencer”, who then posted the news online.
The delay has caused some confusion about whether it was May 19 or 20 that the group went into the cave.
Zach Hope is South-East Asia correspondent. He is a former reporter at the Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
