Authorities believe that 27-year-old Muhammad Hassan “slipped and stayed hanging” from a rope while waiting for assistance in the moments leading up to his untimely demise. Hassan, a dad to three, was on his first excursion with the organization Lela Peak excursion. They “tried their hardest to bring him down but they couldn’t do it and he passed away after two hours,” according to Anwar Syed, one of the group’s members.
The excursion group told MailOnline that they offered to pay porters to bring down his body, but “everyone said that it’s impossible to bring him down.” Previously, a famous climber had to defend herself after allegations surfaced that her team had climbed over Hassan on their way to setting a new world record on K2. Norwegian mountaineer Kristin Harila was criticized by her peers after photos surfaced showing her climbing party passing an ailing parent.
They said it was unimaginable for such a thing to happen in the Alps and that a Western climber would not have been allowed to die. After summiting Pakistan’s K2 on July 27, Harila became the fastest person in history to climb the world’s 14 highest peaks, all of which are over 8,000 meters in altitude. Mohammed Hassan, a porter, went down a cliff at the top of the bottleneck, a location 8,200 meters above sea level, while carrying the climber. Ms. Harila stated that her team did everything in their power to save Mr. Hassan, but that the circumstances were too risky to safely transport him.
Austrian climbers Wilhelm Steindl and Philip Flämig, who were also on K2, claim to have caught film of Harila and her team strolling over his body with a drone hours after they reached the ridge. What Mr. Flämig said to the Standard newspaper in Austria was reported verbatim from the drone footage. “While everyone else is racing to the top, he is being cared for by a single individual. The truth is that there was no coordinated effort to save anyone, despite the presence of Sherpas and mountain guides. Mr. Steindl elaborated, saying, “Such a thing would be unimaginable in the Alps.
He was given the bare minimum of respect and treated like a slave.They would have rushed to his aid if they realized he was a Westerner. He had no one to blame except himself. What transpired there is a scandal. To keep statistics, a living individual was deliberately left on the ground. Ms. Harila stated to The Telegraph, “It is simply not correct to argue that we did nothing to support him. We spent an hour and a half trying to get him back up, and my cameraman stayed to help out for another hour after that. Not once did he feel abandoned. It’s impossible to imagine that he might have been spared under the circumstances. A tight trail and severe snow conditions made it unlikely that anyone could have carried him off the mountain after he fell.
