Tears of joy after toddler found alive
<p>After going missing for over three days in bushland near Putty in NSW, three-year-old toddler Anthony 'AJ' Elfalak, has been found alive in a creek.</p>
<p>His father and family broke down crying tears of joy after his son was found alive after frantic searching for the boy by an SES rescue team and squads of police.</p>
<p>Anthony Elfalak went missing on Friday about 11.45 am from his house in Putty, a rural town about 150km northwest of Sydney.</p>
<p>His mother said he would never wandered off and she feared he’d been abducted.</p>
<p>AJ was last seen playing at his family's 256ha rural property. AJ, who has autism and is non-verbal, was last seen playing on the porch and his mother says he was out of her sight for just a matter of seconds.</p>
<p><strong><img style="width: 500px; height: 280.99838969404186px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7843765/aj-search-ses-um.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/5a70a451e6d441079f6ff94df7a07c5d" /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Spotted in a creek by helicopter</strong></p>
<p>The youngster was spotted in a creek less than two kilometres away from a helicopter on Monday morning, police confirmed.</p>
<p>He was whisked away in an ambulance with his mother, to be taken to hospital for a full assessment.</p>
<p>The news sparked emotional scenes at the family property, where AJ's parents and friends were seen cheering and screaming in delight moments after being told he had been found.</p>
<p>AJ was dehydrated, drenched in water from the creek and “a little skinnier than usual” but otherwise well, his family said.</p>
<p>Ms Elfalak dropped to the feet of police officers as they assured her that her youngest son was alive and in the care of paramedics.</p>
<p>For the next 15 minutes, loved ones sprinted from every direction, shouting the extraordinary news again and again.</p>
<p>AJ's mum Kelly was overcome with emotion as she thanked everyone involved.</p>
<p>“Thank you for everyone. Thank you for the government. Thank you for the police. Thank you very much,” she said.</p>
<p>“Thank you to my friend, my cousin, my sisters, my family. Thank you, everybody and whoever prayed for us.”</p>
<p>“We searched this area again and again,” a family friend said who has spent the last four days trawling the unforgiving terrain.</p>
<p>“We never even noticed the creek, and that’s where the found him. He was in the creek,” they added.</p>
<p><strong>Premier says she’s “absolutely delighted”</strong></p>
<p>NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was “absolutely delighted” by AJ's discovery, saying it was “much-needed good news in otherwise difficult circumstances.”</p>
<p>“I mean, I think all of us have been crossing everything to make sure AJ is brought back safely,” she told reporters.</p>
<p><strong>Circumstances of Aj's disappearance still not clear</strong></p>
<p>Only a few hours before AJ was found, family friend Alan Hashem claimed crucial security camera footage had “gone missing” from the property.</p>
<p>Hashem was at the property at the time AJ went missing and he claimed someone had tampered with security cameras he had installed on a tree high above the remote bushland road outside the home.</p>
<p>He said the time AJ went missing was in the four-hour window of footage that was now missing.</p>
<p>“There's one key factor and this is probably the first time I actually mentioned this, I installed cameras on that post right there,' he told reporters today.</p>
<p>“There's footage missing, unexplained. (We have footage from) days before, days after, but not during the time.</p>
<p>“You know what's more alarming? We installed it so high you can't tamper with it and we had two mechanisms of storage - cloud storage and physical storage - and there's no data in that time slot.</p>
<p>“We provided the user name and password to the police, we provided them the actual original memory card. There's a lot of explaining to do,” he added.</p>
<p><strong><img style="width: 500px; height: 500px;" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/7843766/aj-search-facebook-um.jpg" alt="" data-udi="umb://media/170e7317bac14625b07250fe37e707d5" /></strong></p>
<p><strong>Investigations will be ongoing</strong></p>
<p>AJ’s older brothers were in charge of keeping an eye on him as they played outside while their father was fixing quad bikes.</p>
<p>“The oldest boy needed to go to the bathroom and took the youngest one AJ and he left him just inside the dining area,' Hashem said.</p>
<p>“After a few minutes, the boy's come out and entered through the other part of the house and the mother goes, 'Where's AJ?'”</p>
<p>“The boys had a puzzled look on their face. We all stand up and at that moment I had the closest view to the driveway and noticed a white ute, we believe either a Mazda or a Toyota, a much older model. It was slowly driving through here.”</p>
<p>A white ute from a nearby property was seized by police on Sunday night as they searched an abandoned shack about 1km south of the Elfalak house, labelling the car a 'vehicle of interest'.</p>
<p>Pictures from the abandoned property show a dingy shack fitted out with old furniture, with the floors strewn with rubbish.</p>
<p>Police cordoned off the area and are trying to ascertain if anyone had been staying there, with 9News reporting it had been declared a crime scene.</p>
<p>They have also seized a number of items from the property, amid reports someone had been sleeping rough there.</p>
<p><em>Image: 9 News and Facebook</em></p>
