Tearful girlfriend of certainly one of two Brits lacking in Italian Dolomites says he was an ‘skilled hiker’ and their disappearance ‘would not make sense’ as rescuers proceed mountain search

The girlfriend of one of the British hikers who is missing in the Italian Dolomite mountains has told how her boyfriend is an ‘experienced’ adventurer, declaring: ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

Bex Dimmock, the girlfriend of missing Aziz Ziriat, was visibly emotional this morning as the desperate search for the two explorers continues a week after they were last seen.

Mr Ziriat, 36, and his friend Samuel Harris, 35, both from London, were hiking in the Dolomites in northern Italy but they have not been heard from since 2.20pm on New Year’s Day.

Their family and friends became concerned when the two hikers missed their flights back to Britain on January 6 and alerted Italian authorities, who launched an urgent search which has been hampered by heavy snow.

Mr Ziriat, who works for Crystal Palace’s Palace for Life foundation, and Mr Harris’ last known location is believed to be close to a hut called Casina Dosson, which is near the town Tione Di Trento, near Riva del Garda, on Lake Garda.

The area has limited phone signal and it’s understood their phone batteries were running out. The Trentino Alpine rescue service used quad bikes and drones to search the area but has encountered difficulties with the poor weather.

Breaking down in tears on Good Morning Britain, Ms Dimmock said today: ‘There’s just so many different possibilities and scenarios, that’s the hardest thing. It doesn’t make sense and we don’t know what decisions they have made.’

She added: ‘They are really experienced, they have been to some really harsh conditions.

‘This trip, they had a plan to go hut to hut and if the weather permitted they would sleep outside.

‘They did have a nice route planned where they would end up in Lake Garda and have some time in that town before coming back.’

Ms Dimmock, who arrived in Italy last night, is hoping that the pair have sought refuge in one of the cabins in the mountains where there are rooms designed for winter which have supplies.

She confirmed that rescuers have searched one refuge and are heading to a second.

‘That’s where I’m hoping that they are’, she added.

In an update last night, friends of the hikers revealed that the search team are ‘confident about the exact area’ the pair might be.

They said: ‘At first light [on Wednesday], they plan to send a helicopter to search the location. There are also two buildings in the area stocked with food that they could be using, which gives us hope given the circumstances.’

In a separate interview with the BBC, Ms Dimmock said: ‘They wanted to do a New Year’s hike. They wanted to go from hut to hut throughout the Dolomites.

‘They were planning on going off-grid, so that’s not unexpected at all.

‘I think they wanted to have some nights where they were out in nature and in fresh air and sleeping in the wild. They have all the gear and they’ve done hikes before.

‘But they also wanted to get into the huts and have fires and drink red wine because it was New Year’s, which they did do, because he did message me at one point and he was carrying a log up the mountain to one of the huts.

She added: ‘I know they made it to the hut, and they were drinking red wine, but he said it was freezing.’

She said she last spoke to Mr Ziriat at about 10:00 GMT on New Year’s Day.

‘He sent some photos of the mountains and a couple of himself,’ she said. He said his phone was about to die but he would write back to me properly soon.’

She said a few hours later, her messages were not being received by Mr Ziriat’s phone.

‘His phone had obviously died at that point, or he was out of range,’ she said.

Desperate friends of the missing pair have also revealed the moment their GPS tracker went dead.

Joseph Sheppard, a friend of Ziriat, who is helping to co-ordinate the rescue, told The Times: ‘[Ziriat and Harris] were at a specific rifugio [shelter] and they looked like they were going to [try] and make it to the next refugio, which was on the other side of a mountain. So they had to go up one and down again.

‘Their tracking [system] followed them from the rifugio up the mountain, it looks like they pretty much got to the peak of it and then the tracking stops.’

In a video, which was yesterday shared with MailOnline, the 36-year-old detailed what feats they will be taking on in the coming days – with plans to climb the 3,000-metre mountains.

Miriam Ziriat, the concerned sister of Mr Ziriat, told MailOnline yesterday: ‘I’m just really, really concerned about them and just desperate to hear something about their whereabouts, just to hear that they’re okay. It’s just obviously very, very worrying.

‘It’s not unusual for us not to hear from him on these kind of trips. He has done these mountaineering trips and tracks before, but he is usually in a larger group – there are only two of them on this trip.

‘But it’s really concerning that it’s been many days and they now missed their flight. We sort of understood that they might lose their phone or that their phone might run out of battery, but for them not to make their flight is a big concern.’

Alpine Rescue, Guardia di Finanza Rescue, Carabinieri and the local fire brigade are involved in trying to locate Ziriat and Harris, but recent snowfall was making it difficult for teams to reach the area.

‘The weather condition has been very poor today. So as far as I know, they haven’t been able to sell out to arrange for a helicopter to search the area, but they have sent drones and some people on foot,’ Miriam Ziriat said after speaking to an Italian officer.

‘They’re hoping when the fog clears, there’s a lot of snow and it’s very foggy, so if the fog clears, they’re hoping to send a search by air as well.’

Family and friends have managed to log into Ziriat’s email, where they found a route the two friends planned to hike on January first. ‘But there’s no data from that point onwards,’ his sister told MailOnline.

She added: ‘Everyone is trying to rally up as much support as possible, trying to raise awareness as much as we can, and trying to kind of draw on all resources to try and locate them.

‘It’s really worrying to not have heard anything at this point, and we’re trying to remain hopeful that we’ll hear some news about a safe location.’

It comes after MailOnline revealed the two missing British men snapped footage revealing their plans to scale 3,000-metre Italian mountains on New Year’s Day before they vanished.

In the video, Mr Ziriat says the pair are going to leave their usual large packs at home.

The 36-year-old explained he and Mr Harris had been ‘lugging’ them up and down the valleys for the past two days of the trip.

Speaking into the camera as he stands outside the mountain hut in his flip-flops, Mr Ziriat says: ‘Happy New Year! Woken up to some delightful sunshine, blue skies.

‘There has not been a cloud in the sky since we got here, which is slightly unnerving but also quite jokes.’

‘I want to attack this today, get up into the some of the 3,000 bits which are up yonder.’

‘Looking forward to a day scampering, we are not taking our packs today, for the last two days lugging up this God-forsaken valley, another day frolicking before schlepping over to the next valley,’ he adds in an extended version of clip.

He also pans to the ‘World War One bunker’ they had stayed in before going missing.

Mr Ziriat, who is described as being 6ft 3in, was a student at the University of Brighton, while Mr Harris, who is 5ft 11in, went to Oxford Brookes.

Both attended Teddington School in Teddington in southwest London.