Six people including a family of four have been found dead after being poisoned by methane during a healing ceremony in northern Ecuador.
Police found the seven-year-old son of the couple that died along with their two daughters in the family car near the scene of the tragedy after he fell asleep while he waited for the night ceremony to finish.
Gabriel Bunay and his wife Martina Tacuri were taken to a thermal rockpool inside an indigenous settlement with their three children for an ‘energy healing’ ritual after being met by a local in the nearby city of Otavalo.
Shaman Gladys Tercero died along with a helper after the spring they were in released a poisonous gas thought to be methane.
The tragedy is believed to have happened just before midnight on Tuesday.
Police chief Jacqueline Haro added: “The boy that survived fell asleep inside his family’s car after his mum told him to go and rest because the water was cold.
“He is now in a children’s home receiving counselling while we wait for relatives to come and pick him up.”
Candles, eggs, medicinal plants and dead birds thought to have been used in the ceremony were also recovered from the scene.
Last April British gap year student Henry Miller died at a tribal ceremony in neighbouring Colombia.
Tragic Henry, 19, from Bristol, collapsed after taking a hallucinogenic drink called yage at a remote rainforest near the village of Mocoa in the south-east of the country.
