Sisters drown in Welsh national park after paddling fully clothed

Two sisters accidentally drowned after they paddled fully clothed at a beauty spot in a national park in Wales, an inquest has heard.Hajra Zahid, 29, and her sibling Haleema, 25, were pulled from pools on the Watkin Path, which leads to the summit of Snowdon.They had visited the picturesque wild swimming site and its waterfall at Eryri (Snowdonia) national park, in the Nant Gwynant area of Gwynedd, on 11 June 2025 with three male friends.The group of five, who were all students at the University of Chester, split up for privacy and religious reasons as the sisters, who could not swim, headed for a pool upstream on the Afon Cwm Llan river.The men later called out for the sisters, from Rotherham in South Yorkshire, but received no reply. When they reached the pools they noticed the women’s shoes and personal belongings by the water’s edge.They later discovered Hajra, a married mother of two, floating face down in her red dress.Caernarfon coroner’s court heard that they managed to pull an unconscious Hajra on to the riverbank but were unable to find Haleema.Emergency services were called and two members of Llanberis mountain rescue team later retrieved Haleema from deep water near the waterfall.Both women were pronounced dead at the scene shortly afterwards.The assistant coroner for north-west Wales, Sarah Riley, said she was satisfied the sisters had intended to paddle in the water.She said: “Having considered the evidence that neither could swim and that they were fully clothed, I am satisfied that neither sister went to swim or enter parts of the pool that would put them out of their depths in the water.”She said one possibility was that one or both had fallen from an “exceptionally slippy” slab of rock at the edge of the pools.The inquest heard that mountain rescue team members who entered the water had also slipped on the same rock.Concluding the deaths were accidental, Riley said the sisters had drowned after they were unable to swim to safety.She said: “I extend my sincere condolences to their friends and family. This is an extremely tragic case and my thoughts remain with them.”Riley also “urged caution” to the public about the dangers of entering such pools.The sisters, originally from Rawalpindi, northern Pakistan, came to the UK in January 2025 to study for master’s degrees in international business.In a statement read out at the inquests, Hajra’s husband, Hessham Minhas, said she “always placed herself at the centre of family life”.He said: “She was a determined, ambitious woman who believed in the power of education and personal growth, with a dream of building a better future for herself and her family.“Her memory lives on in the lives she touched and the family she left behind.”