Sului Piew went missing on December 17 when he went out to play near a plantation where his parents work.

The search for a missing two-year-old boy ended grimly on Tuesday with the discovery of the toddler’s body in a sugarcane plantation in central Thailand.

Nimit Wanchaithanawong, governor of Suphan Buri province, said the boy’s body was found around five kilometres from where he was last seen, and officials were collecting evidence to determine the cause of his death.

Sului Piew, the son of migrant workers from Myanmar, went missing December 17 when he went out to play near the plantation where his parents work.

Hundreds of rescuers combed through a 32-hectare field of two-metre-high sugarcane plants to search for the child, whose body was finally discovered near a small irrigation stream on the plantation.

Ronakorn Prakongsri, a police colonel, told television station ThaiPBS that Sului’s body was found with injuries on his legs but he added that officers would wait for an autopsy report before they pursued investigating the point.

Nimit, the governor, said the missing boy’s family had informed authorities of his disappearance when his three-year-old friend told her parents that she saw Sului being abducted.

The search for Sului, which officially began December 19, involved hundreds of people including scuba divers, dogs and four elephants with their trainers riding them.