Children who disappeared a month ago in the jungle of Colombia are alive, rescue teams found traces that they survived the plane crash

Four children missing in the Amazon jungle after a plane crash nearly a month ago are believed to be alive, military officials say, as searches continue in inaccessible terrain.

According to unofficial information, four children, the eldest of whom is 13 years old and the youngest is 11 months old, are wandering in the jungle after the crash of a plane in the southeast of Colombia on May 1, reports the Telegraph.

The plane crash took the life of the children's mother, Magdalena Mukutui Valencia, the pilot and an indigenous leader. However, there was no sign of the children when the Colombian military found the wreckage.

More than 100 men have been involved in the search for the four children, and officials leading the mission say it is "highly likely" the children are still alive because of the evidence they have found.

The latest clue to the children's possible whereabouts is a footprint found in jungle mud that military officials believe is that of 13-year-old Leslie, the oldest of the missing children.

With the help of satellite images, the rescuers discovered the path that the children took from the wreckage of the plane and at the same time the rescuers came across some of their belongings, a makeshift shelter, half-eaten fruit. Last week they found a pair of shoes and a diaper.

"Based on the evidence, we found that the children are alive. It would be easy to find them if they were dead, because the sniffer dogs would have found them," said the leader of the rescue team, General Pedro Sánchez.

On the morning of May 1, a Cessna 206 plane left the jungle area known as Araraquara, and headed for the city of San Jose del Guaviare in the Colombian Amazon.

A few minutes into the 350-kilometer journey, the pilot reported engine trouble and the plane disappeared from radar.

Between May 15 and 16, soldiers found the bodies of three adults and the wreckage of the plane in dense vegetation. But the children were gone.

About 200 soldiers and locals cleared the dense jungle of about 320 square kilometers. The Air Force dropped 10,000 leaflets in the forest with instructions in Spanish and the indigenous Huitoto language, telling the children to stay put.

The leaflets also included survival tips and the army dropped food parcels and bottled water to the children.

"On Sunday, the army placed powerful reflectors with a radius of up to three kilometers in the area so that the minors could approach us," said a member of the search team, Colonel Fausto Avelaneda. /Telegraph/