Two female backpackers from Europe were savagely attacked on a remote Australian beach by a travelling companion they had met hours earlier, police said.

Two men who could face the death penalty for the murders of a pair of British backpackers in Thailand are “confident” they will be acquitted as they prepare to learn their fate today, their legal team has said.

They arrived in Nepal as backpackers a day before a deadly earthquake that flattened large swaths of this impoverished Himalayan nation.