Mountaineer accused of stepping over dying Sherpa in pursuit of K2 file
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prime mountaineer has denied her workforce supplied no assist to a dying Sherpa and stepped over him of their efforts to summit Pakistan’s K2 mountain and safe a brand new world record.
Fellow moutaineers have condemned the group after pictures emerged of climbers, a part of a gaggle led by Norway’s Kristin Harila, clambering previous injured porter Mohammed Hassan on a harmful ridge.
The 50-strong group dodged avalanches on July 27 as they made the ultimate ascent alongside a treacherous, single-file path generally known as the Bottleneck.
They claimed {that a} Western climber wouldn’t have been left to die like that.
Harila, 37, was one of many climbers on the day, securing her 14th highest peak in simply over three months to turn into the world’s quickest climber to scale all peaks above 8,000 metres.
During her ascent the porter Mr Hassan fell, roughly 1,300ft from the summit.
Mohammed Hassan, seen mendacity susceptible on the bottom, had fallen from a sheer ledge
/ Lakpa Sherpa (8k Expeditions)Ms Harila stated Mr Hassan was poorly outfitted and her workforce did every thing they might to save lots of him, however circumstances had been too harmful.
Below her Instagram publish celebrating her summitting of K2, social media customers slammed her, saying “shame on you, “where is your humanity” and calling her “reckless”.
Harila defended herself on-line and urged individuals to “be kind”. She added: “I hope we can learn something from this tragedy. Hassan was not properly equipped to take on an 8,000m summit. “
Two climbers who were also on K2 that day claimed fellow mountaineers were more interested in setting records than saving lives.
Austrian climbing duo Wilhelm Steindl and Philip Flämig say footage they later recorded using a drone showed climbers walking over his body instead of trying to rescue him.
“It’s all there in the drone footage,” Mr Flämig instructed Austria’s Standard newspaper.
“He is being treated by one person while everyone else is pushing towards the summit. The fact is that there was no organised rescue operation although there were Sherpas and mountain guides on site who could have taken action.”
Among those that handed him was Ms Harila.
“He was treated like a second-class human being,” Mt Steindl added. “If he had been a Westerner, he would have been rescued immediately.”
Ms Harila instructed The Telegraph: “It is simply not true to say that we did nothing to help him.
“We tried to lift him back up for an hour and a half and my cameraman stayed on for another hour to look after him. At no point was he left alone.
“He fell on what is probably the most dangerous part of the mountain where the chances of carrying someone off were limited by the narrow trail and poor snow conditions.”
A GoFundMe arrange for Mr Hassan’s household states that he leaves behind three youngsters and a spouse, in addition to an aged grandmother.
The web page has already raised £63,000.
K2 is taken into account to be the world’s most harmful mountain because it has a fatality charge of round 19 per cent in comparison with simply 6.5 per cent on Everest, in line with estimates.