A mountaineer has described the efforts her team made in vain to save a fellow climber, after pictures appeared to show them stepping over his supine body and leaving him on the mountainside.
Mohammed Hassan, a porter during the ascent of K2 by Kristin Harila and her Nepali guide Tenjen (Lama) Sherpa, died after falling off a sheer edge at a height of about 8,200 metres.
Harila, a Norwegian, and her team have faced claims they were focused on the attempt to become the world’s fastest climber to scale all peaks above 8,000 metres, over Hassan’s life.
But she has said the footage showing climbers stepping over Hassan was shot after hours of work had gone in to trying to save him – none of which was caught on camera.
“First of all, it is a very, very tragic accident on the mountain. And we feel so sorry for Hassan and his family,” Harila, 37, told Sky News on Friday.
While she said she was not with Hassan when the footage was shot, “we were just behind him when he fell”. She said: “We saw him hanging upside down and, very early, we decided we need to try to get him turned around.”
She described how two members of the expedition made their way to where Hassan was hanging; the second succeeding in bringing him back to the trail.
After about an hour and a half with Hassan, Harila said the team decided to split up because they heard on the radio that members of a rope-fixing team up ahead were possibly in danger themselves.
While some moved on to check on that situation, others stayed behind with Hassan – giving him some of their oxygen and warm water.
Harila added that the narrowness of the trail at that point forced people to move single file, meaning it was impossible for people to gather around the prone man, and that the conditions there were so treacherous that staying for any time was itself risking death.
Harila has also said on her website that she believed Hassan was being helped, and the gravity of his situation only became clear to her and other climbers later.
She and her team have faced criticism from some who denounced them for callousness when the footage emerged of climbers continuing on while Hassan lay on the mountainside.
The Austrian climbing duo Wilhelm Steindl and Philip Flämig, who were also on K2 that day, said footage showed Hassan “being treated by one person while everyone else is pushing towards the summit”.
Steindl told Austria’s Standard newspaper: “Such a thing would be unthinkable in the Alps. He was treated like a second-class human being. If he had been a westerner, he would have been rescued immediately.”
But Harila has said the conditions at the relevant point of the trail meant they could do no more for Hassan than they did.
“The bottleneck is so narrow that you can only fit one person in front and one behind the person being helped.” She added that it was similarly impossible to bring Hassan’s body back down as they descended the mountain, because to do so safely would have required a team too large to fit the narrow trail.
• This article was amended on 14 August 2023. An earlier version referred to Tenjen (Lama) Sherpa as a “Nepali Sherpa”. This should have said “Nepali guide”. The word Sherpa refers to a member of the indigenous people of the Himalayan region, known for their skill as mountaineers and guides.
