A top mountaineer has denied her team offered no help to a dying Sherpa and stepped over him in their efforts to summit Pakistan’s K2 mountain and secure a new world record.
Fellow moutaineers have condemned the group after images emerged of climbers, part of a group led by Norway’s Kristin Harila, clambering past injured porter Mohammed Hassan on a dangerous ridge.
The 50-strong group dodged avalanches on July 27 as they made the final ascent along a treacherous, single-file path known as the Bottleneck.
They claimed that a Western climber would not have been left to die like that.
Harila, 37, was one of the climbers on the day, securing her 14th highest peak in just over three months to become the world’s fastest climber to scale all peaks above 8,000 metres.
During her ascent the porter Mr Hassan fell, roughly 1,300ft from the summit.
Ms Harila said Mr Hassan was poorly equipped and her team did everything they could to save him, but conditions were too dangerous.
Below her Instagram post celebrating her summitting of K2, social media users slammed her, saying “shame on you, “where is your humanity” and calling her “reckless”.
Harila defended herself online and urged people 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 told 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 who passed 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 told 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 set up for Mr Hassan’s family states that he leaves behind three children and a wife, as well as an elderly grandmother.
The page has already raised £63,000.
K2 is considered to be the world’s most dangerous mountain as it has a fatality rate of around 19 per cent compared to just 6.5 per cent on Everest, according to estimates.
