An American woman and her one-year-old daughter have been trampled to death by an elephant in the foothills of Mount Kenya.

The 39-year-old , whose identity has not been formally released, was among a group of tourists on a short walk with a guide near the Castle Forest Lodge, in Kirinyaga, central Kenya, on Monday. She and her baby were reportedly charged from behind by the elephant.

Four other tourists, including the woman’s husband – a teacher at the International School of Kenya, in Nairobi – escaped and ran back to the lodge to raise the alarm. Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) rangers retrieved the bodies, which were flown to Nairobi by helicopter.

“This is an accident like any other,” Melia Van Laar, the Dutch owner of the hotel, which was frequented by members of the British royal family during colonial times, told the Daily Nation newspaper. “The elephant came from behind the bush and attacked the victims.”

National parks are unfenced in Kenya, and with more animals living outside the reserves than within, human-wildlife conflict is so frequent that the KWS has set rates and procedures on compensation for injury or death. Rural Kenyans are the most common victims. Attacks by wild animals on tourists occur most years, but are rare considering the number of international visitors to Kenya.

In one of the most famous cases, the British woman Wendy Martin was badly gored by an elephant while jogging with two friends and a guide near an exclusive lodge to the north of Mount Kenya in 2000. Martin, the wife of a British diplomat posted to Nairobi, successfully sued the lodge for failing to warn her of the dangers, winning more than £500,000 in damages by a Kenyan court in 2008.