Greek police are investigating the deaths of two Irish teenagers on the island of Ios over the weekend.
According to The Guardian, Andrew O’Donnell and Max Wall, both 18, were part of a large group on a school graduation excursion to Ios. They died hours apart in different areas of the Greek island.
“We’re heartbroken,” Tim Kelleher, the principal of St Michael’s College where the boys sat their leaving exams, said.
“We have a very tight-knit community and these are two fantastic young men with their lives ahead of them.”
Ireland’s minister for further and higher education, Simon Harris, also called the news “devastating” on Twitter.
“Thinking of the families and friends of Andrew and Max and all leaving cert students abroad in Greece who were enjoying holidays after exams and are now encountering such shock and pain and grief,” Harris wrote.
These tributes come as Greek authorities said the bodies of O’Donnell and Wall would be transferred to the port city of Piraeus near Athens for autopsies to be conducted.
The regional police directorate of the south Aegean handling the affair said it expected the postmortems to yield answers.
“O’Donnell was found on a path between the port and Ios town and it seems he had fallen,” Brigadier Thanos Loukas, the directorate’s commanding officer, said.
“Wall was found very close to the place where he was staying. We have since heard he had a history of heart problems but the answers lie in the autopsies. The cause of death in both cases will become clearer once they are carried out.”
Source: The Guardian.
