This contradicted information fed into state-owned media that the Danish women were discovered by staff unconscious on their bathroom floor.

This masthead could not independently verify the testimony. A worker at the hostel said any information about what happened needed to come from Laotian authorities.

The document’s creator said he met Coyman and Sorensen in Vietnam last month. They had such a good time together, they agreed to meet in Laos and travel to Thailand as a group.

He identified them in the document as Danish woman one and Danish woman two.

“We had arranged to meet in Laos on Thursday [November 14] – the girls had already been in Vang Vieng for a few days, but I was still in a different country,” he wrote.

“On [November 13], Danish woman one told me that she was sick and had never been so sick before – she said she had been vomiting all night and day.”

Concerned, he said he got to Vang Vieng as fast as he could, but the women were no longer contactable. He did not know where they were staying.

“After searching for a whole day I overheard a story about a sick girl getting hospitalised and that she had been staying at Nana Backpackers Hostel,” he said. “I rushed there and showed the staff their names and photos.”

But he said a worker told him they had “checked out” the previous day. Later, the same worker had sent a voice memo saying one woman had gone to the Laotian capital, Vientiane.

“The girls are best friends, so I thought that they would have been together,” he said. The hostel worker allegedly claimed to the man that he did not know anything.

“I spent the day [November 15] in Vang Vieng trying to locate where exactly they were, but no hospitals were able to speak English on the phone or didn’t even have a working phone number,” the man said.

“In the evening I contacted Danish woman one’s parents to let them know that I was concerned. They also were unable to make contact with their daughter or her friend on the phone.”

He said he got through to Kasemrad International Hospital in Vientiane on the emergency line, but he said staff were rude and failed to call him back as promised. At the hospital in Vang Vieng, meanwhile, “they had no clue about anything” and “started laughing at me when I tried to use a translation app on my phone”.

“I got angry … so I took a book I could see off the counter, which I rightfully guessed would be a patient information book. I saw Danish woman one’s name, and the notes stated that she was in [Vientiane] in a coma.”

At some point that night, he got a return call from the emergency line in Vientiane to say that she had died, but he did not believe the information was legitimate.

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“I contacted Danish woman one’s father and asked if he could send someone to look there,” he said. “It was already late in the evening so I booked a bus from Vang Vieng to Vientiane to go and look for them myself in the morning.

“I went to bed and asked the parents to keep me up to date. In the night the father told me that I didn’t need to search for them any more because it had been confirmed to him that they both passed away.”