2023-06-17 13:04:13
A 16-year-old teenager drowned on Friday in the Ourthe in Barvaux, while cooling off in the river with two comrades. An unaccompanied foreign minor (Mena), the young Cameroonian had arrived in Belgium three weeks earlier, the Luxembourg prosecutor’s office said on Saturday.
The incident occurred around 6:00 p.m. According to a walker who was on the opposite bank, interviewed as a witness, two young people sitting on a pontoon were dipping their feet in the Ourthe, while a third, the victim, was in the water.
According to the statements of his comrades, the teenager told them that he could swim to the middle of the river, which he undertook to do. The youngster then found himself in difficulty, struggling in the water. His two friends dove in to try to rescue him but lost track of him.
A helicopter and then divers were sent to locate the teenager. The latter found his body 10 meters from where he had sunk, 2.5 meters deep.
“A medical examiner confirmed the drowning and ruled out any outside intervention“, said the magistrate on duty at the Marche-en-Famenne section of the Luxembourg prosecutor’s office.
“We had to draw up two exclusion perimeters to keep the curious away.“, she regretted, specifying that these perimeters had since then been lifted. The young person resided in a reception center managed by the Red Cross.
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