The captain of the Thai boys’ football team that was trapped in a cave for two weeks in 2018 has reportedly died.
The plight of the 12 trapped boys and their coach captured the world’s attention as rescuers spent days planning an operation to get them out of the Thai cave they’d been trapped in due to rising floodwaters.
Their emergence was greeted with scenes of joy in Thailand and overseas.
Zico Foundation, a Thai non-profit that counted Duangpetch as a former student, confirmed his death this afternoon in a post expressing condolences.
Supatpong Methigo, who described himself as a former teacher of the boy commonly known as “Dom”, described him as a great kid who studied and prayed hard.
Writing on Facebook, he said Duangpetch’s grandmother told him the boy had suffered an accident. There were reports he had a head injury.
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Supatpong said he hoped his “dharma”, a Buddhist word with multiple meanings, would follow the boy into his next life.
The Wild Boars team, then aged between 11 and 16, and their 25-year-old coach became trapped on June 23, 2018 while exploring the Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex in the northern province of Chiang Rai when a downpour flooded the tunnels.
British divers found the team hungry and huddled in darkness on a muddy bank in a partly flooded chamber several kilometres inside the caves but it took days to figure out how to rescue them.
Divers painstakingly threaded their way through the complicated cave system in rescue missions that lasted as long as 11 hours.
Volunteers from as far away as Australia and the United States helped with the effort to rescue the boys.
