The bodies of two Dublin women students, who died after their jeep overturned while visiting a safari park in Kenya, are due to be flown home today.
Ms Mary O'Connor (21) from Foxrock and Ms Caroline Healy (21) from Sandyford were both final-year engineering students at University College Dublin.
Their bodies were airlifted to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, yesterday for return to Dublin.
They died on Thursday morning when the jeep in which they were travelling overturned. They had been on safari with other students, from UCD and Trinity College Dublin, in Tsavo national park, about four hours east of Nairobi. A male student sustained a hand injury in the incident.
Speaking from Nairobi yesterday, Mr Joseph Newell, from Leopardstown, Dublin, who was among the party of students, told RTE News the group was "shattered" by the tragedy.
"It's like a bad dream. I don't know why it happened. We don't know why it happened to the particular people it did.
"We all just want to get home really. That's the main thing. We're trying our best to get home as fast as possible."
Ms O'Connor, a civil engineering student, is survived by her parents, Pat and Helen, sister Aoife and brothers Cormac and Rory.
Ms Healy, a mechanical engineering student, is survived by her parents Joe and Geraldine, and two sisters Sarah and Elena. Funeral arrangements have yet to be announced.
A spokesman for UCD said: "They were very popular in their classes with their fellow students and staff. It is an awful tragedy, especially when you think it was their last holiday as students. They were just about to enter into the final leg of their studies with their whole lives ahead of them."
Mr Newell said the news of the deaths was communicated to Dublin by a Nairobi-based aunt of one of the student group.
Asked how the tragedy happened, Mr Newell said: "We can't really understand it. We were driving as always. This wasn't the first time we'd been through a national park. We'd been through two already and we were driving along. We weren't driving fast at all. The roads aren't the best, in fact the roads are pretty slippery. It was more a case that the road we were driving along was very sandy. "The driver found that, as he was turning a corner, the wheels skidded and the car wasn't in his control. Because of this, it hit a ditch and the car just flipped over and, unfortunately, two people got trapped."
He said the entire party was in the same vehicle, a land-cruiser, and it was being driven by a member of their group. When the vehicle turned over, he said, they were in the "middle of nowhere". He said the two women had died at the scene. Others had sustained very minor injuries. All were flown to hospital in Kenya.