Climbers 'paid no heed' to dying porter on K2 mountain, with rescue taking three hours, friend says

14 August 2023, 09:47

A friend of a porter who died while climbing K2, the world's second-tallest mountain, has said climbers paid the struggling man "no heed" as they stepped over hjm.

Pakistani man Mohammed Hassan died after a falling from a treacherous ridge on July 27, the same day that Norway’s Kristin Harila made a record-breaking ascent to the summit.

Video appears to show climbers walking past the stricken man as he lay dying. Hassan Sultan, a friend of Mr Hassan from the same village, said that no one helped, and that rescuers took hours to arrive.

"Everyone advanced closer to us and paid no heed to help Hassan," he told the Times. "I left the summit and sat with him and called the base camp for help but no one came for the rescue.

"I shook him several times to see if he was alive but he was not responding."

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K2 is an 8,611 metre mountain on the border of Pakistan and China, and is considered one of the most dangerous peaks.

Mr Hassan died at the Bottleneck, a single-file path near the summit after falling and getting trapped by ropes. His oxygen supply was broken.

Mr Sultan said: "I started descending towards him and kept calling his name but there was no response at all. When I reached closer I saw ice anchors and he was hanging upside down.

"I managed to get closer but still there was a distance of 20ft between us and he was pleading for help. I felt helpless as there was no way to get closer to him".

Ms Harila, whose ascent of K2 made her the world’s fastest climber to scale all peaks above 8,000 metres, said her team did everything they could to save Mr Hassan but conditions were too dangerous to move him.

However Austrian climbers Wilhelm Steindl and Philip Flämig who were also on K2 say drone footage they later recorded hours after Harila and her team had passed the ridge 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.

Mr Steindl added: "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. No one felt responsible for him.

“What happened there is a disgrace. A living human was left lying so that records could be set."

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.

“Given the conditions, it is hard to see how he could have been saved. 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.

"We did all we could for him."

Anwar Syed, of the group, said two climbers "tried their hardest to bring him down but they couldn't do it and he passed away after two hours".

The expedition group told the MailOnline it offered to pay porters to retrieve his body, but “everyone said that it’s impossible to bring him down”.

Mr Sultan said: “My friend’s body is still on K2 and must have been buried under a huge snow, alone. I left him there with a heavy heart.”

Pakistani authorities have launched an investigation into the incident. Mr Hassan leaves behind his wife, three sons, and his mother.