Four children who were missing for more than two weeks after a plane crash in the Colombian jungle have been found alive, the country’s president said.

The Cessna 206 was carrying seven people between Araracuara in the Amazonas province and San Jose del Guaviare, a city in the Guaviare province, when it suffered an engine failure on May 1.

The bodies of three adults, including the pilot, were found inside the plane.

A large-scale search operation involving more than 100 soldiers and sniffer dogs was launched to find the four children, aged 13, nine, four and eleven months.

“After an arduous search by our military, we have found alive the four children who were missing after a plane crash in Guaviare. A joy for the country,” President Gustavo Petro said yesterday on Twitter.

The children are said to have been rescued by military personnel, firefighters and civil aviation officials in the dense jungle of the Colombian province of Caqueta.

However, sources from the Ministry of Defense told local media that they had no confirmation that the ships had been found.

Preliminary information from the Civil Aviation Authority, which coordinated the rescue efforts, suggested that the children had escaped from the plane and headed into the rainforest to find help.

Rescue workers, with the help of search dogs, had previously found discarded fruit that the children had eaten to survive, as well as improvised shelters made from jungle vegetation.