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Four teenagers who disappeared on a weekend camping trip to Snowdonia have been found dead after their car was discovered submerged in a river.
The bodies of Harvey Owen, 18, Wilf Henderson, 17, Jevon Hirst, 16 and Hugo Morris, 17 were found near the A4085 at Garreg, near Tremadog, on Tuesday afternoon after a major search operation.
The sixth-form students, all from Shrewsbury, Shropshire, are believed to have been killed after the silver Ford Fiesta they were driving crashed on a “windy, narrow” country road and plunged into water.
It is not yet clear whether they crashed on their way home on Monday, or shortly after they were last seen on Sunday afternoon and their phones went dead.
Their disappearance sparked a huge search, with mountain rescue coastguard teams scouring the remote area for any sign of the teenagers.
On Tuesday evening, Supt Owain Llewellyn, of North Wales Police, said a vehicle had been discovered “upside down, partially submerged in water”.
“Tragically the bodies of four young males were recovered from within the vehicle.”
Mr Llewelyn said the families of the missing boys had been informed and an investigation was under way to formally identify the victims and “understand what led to this tragic accident”.
The boys are believed to have left Shrewsbury on Saturday night before travelling 75 miles to the coastal Welsh village of Harlech.
Their silver Ford Fiesta was seen around lunchtime on Sunday driving in the Porthmadog area and a short time later, their families say, they used their phones for the last time.
The teenagers, who all attended Shrewsbury College, were planning to return home on Monday morning but their parents contacted police that afternoon when they failed to arrive.
Over the next 24 hours mountain rescue teams, coastguard and emergency services searched Snowdonia and the remote surrounding countryside.
Helicopters were heard by residents of Garreg, close to where the car was found, in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Emyr Owen, who lives near the crash site, said that the weather in the area had been “atrocious”.
At 10 o’clock on Monday morning, a member of the public contacted police after spotting a car that had left the A4085 on a narrow stretch of road between Beddgelert and Llanfrothen.
Supt Llewellyn said the search area where the car was found had “some complexities”, adding that it was a “difficult scene to manage”.
The mother of Harvey Owen, Crystal, who had driven down to Snowdonia to help with the search effort before the bodies were found, told the BBC she had been unaware he was going on a camping trip and believed he had been going to a friend’s grandparents’ house.
“If I’d have known [where he was going] I wouldn’t have let him due to the winter weather conditions”, she said.
Wilf’s girlfriend posted a tribute on social media as the news of his death broke, writing: “I’m going to miss you forever.”
Eryri National Park, also known as Snowdonia, is Wales’s largest national park, covering a total of 823 sq miles (1,324 sq km). The village of Garreg, the nearest settlement to where they were found, contains only 18 homes.
A resident of 50 years, who asked not to be named, said that the sound of helicopters woke her at five o’clock on Tuesday morning.
She said that the road the boys had been travelling on, which leads to Beddgelert, was “very bendy”.
Councillor June Jones, of Gwynedd Council for Glaslyn ward, said the discovery was “incredibly sad”.
She added: “I think people will be shocked for a long time. People want answers. Why? What happened there? What happened?”
Cllr Jones said the mobile phone signal in the valley was non-existent so the majority of the locals had assumed “oh they’re out of signal, they’ve gone camping, they’re having fun.”
Liz Saville Roberts, the local MP, and Mabon ap Gwynfor, the local Senedd member, said in a joint statement: “No words can sufficiently reflect the sorrow that this news brings to our whole community.”
