The mum of four children who were rescued after 40 days alone in the Amazon jungle survived for four days after their plane crashed.
Magdalena Mucutuy told her children to leave her and find help as she lay dying, according to the father of two of her children.
Manuel Ranoque said before she died, the mother likely would have told them: “Go away,” apparently asking them to leave the wreckage site to survive.
Authorities have not commented on this version of events.
The siblings, aged 13, nine, five, and one, were airlifted out of the Colombian jungle on Friday in a rescue that stunned the world.
They were moved to a military hospital in the nation’s capital Bogota.
Speaking to reporters outside the hospital, Mr Ranoque said: “The one thing that [13-year-old Lesly] has cleared up for me is that, in fact, her mother was alive for four days.
“Before she died, their mum told them something like, ‘You guys get out of here. You guys are going to see the kind of man your dad is, and he’s going to show you the same kind of great love that I have shown you,” he said.
Since the miraculous discovery on Friday details have slowly been emerging of their ordeal.
Rescue worker Nicolas Ordonez Gomes recalled the moment they discovered the children.
“The eldest daughter, Lesly, with the little one in her arms, ran towards me. Lesly said: ‘I’m hungry,’” he told public broadcast channel RTVC.
“One of the two boys was lying down. He got up and said to me: ‘My mum is dead.’” He said rescuers responded with “positive words, saying that we were friends, that we were sent by the family”.
Mr Ordonez Gomes said the boy replied: “I want some bread and sausage.”
Henry Guerrero, an Indigenous man who was part of the search group, told reporters that the children were found with two small bags containing some clothes, a towel, a flashlight, two cellphones, a music box and a soda bottle.
He said they used the bottle to collect water in the jungle, and he added that after they were rescued the youngsters complained of being hungry. “They wanted to eat rice pudding, they wanted to eat bread,” he said.
Fidencio Valencia, a child’s uncle, told the media outlet Noticias Caracol that the children were starting to talk and one of them said they hid in tree trunks to protect themselves in a jungle area filled with snakes, animals and mosquitoes. He said they were exhausted.
The four siblings appeared to be emaciated from the weeks they spent fending for themselves in the wilderness.
Ms Mucutuy and her children had been travelling on the Cessna 206 aircraft to Araracuara, in Amazonas province, to San José del Guaviare, on May 1 when it issued a mayday alert due to engine failure.
The bodies of the mother and the two pilots were found at the crash site by the army but there was no sign of the children and it appeared they had wandered into the rainforest to find help.
They quickly became the focus of a huge rescue operation involving dozens of soldiers and local people.
Rescuers tracked the children down after spotting signs in the jungle, including footprints and fruit that had been bitten into.
Members of the children’s community had hoped that their knowledge of fruits and jungle survival skills would give them a better chance of remaining alive.
Astrid Cáceres, head of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare, said the timing of their ordeal meant the “the jungle was in harvest” and they could eat fruit that was in bloom.
