Following the astonishing rescue of four indigenous children who wandered in the Colombian jungle for 40 days, the army announced Saturday that the search continues for Wilson, a sniffer dog that participated in the feat and is now lost in thick vegetation.

“The search is not over. Our principle: we leave no one behind,” the institution said on its Twitter account. “Soldiers are continuing the operation to find Wilson,” he added, accompanied by photos of the six-year-old Belgian Malinois.

The dog got lost in the Amazon jungle in the south of the country while tracking the four indigenous children aged 13, 9, 5 and one who survived the plane crash on May 1 and were located on Friday.

Wilson was key in the search operations, as he found Cristin’s bottle in the middle of the vegetation, the youngest who turned one year old during the amazing journey through a habitat where jaguars, pumas, snakes and other predators roam. The minors, weak but alive, were transferred to Bogotá, where they are hospitalized.

Astrid Cáceres, director of the state entity that watches over children’s rights, stated on Saturday that the minors indicated that they had met a dog in the jungle, without specifying if it was Wilson.

Lesly, 13 years old and the eldest of the siblings, “told us about the puppy,” the official told the press. She added that the children talk “of the puppy that was lost, that they don’t know where it was and that it was with them for a while.”

The army registered the disappearance of the animal on Thursday and advanced a hypothesis: “Due to the complexity of the terrain, the humidity and the adverse weather conditions, it would have become disoriented,” the institution said in a bulletin.

The military also claimed to have “found footprints that belonged to the minors and very close to those that could have belonged to the dog.”

The mother of the children, an indigenous leader and the pilot of the aircraft died in the accident. The two younger brothers turned 5 and 1 during their journey through the jungle.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project