K2: Climbers deny walking by dying sherpa in bid to break record

A well-known Norwegian mountaineer has denied accusations that her team climbed over an injured sherpa during a bid to break a world record.

The sherpa, named as Mohammed Hassan, had fallen off a ledge on Pakistan’s K2 – the world’s second-highest mountain.

Video posted by other climbers appears to show a group walking by Mr Hassan, who reportedly died a few hours later.

But Kristin Harila said she and her team tried everything to help him in dangerous conditions.

The Norwegian was heading for K2’s summit to secure a world record and become the fastest climber to scale all peaks above 8,000m (26,000ft).

But during the ascent on 27 July, Mr Hassan reportedly fell from an extremely narrow path known as a bottleneck.

Austrian climbers Wilhelm Steindl and Philip Flämig have posted pictures appearing to show people climbing over him.

The pair were also on the mountain that day, but had cancelled their ascent because of dangerous weather conditions and an avalanche.

They had been filming for a documentary about Mr Steindl’s attempt to reach the summit.

As their camera display was small, they say they only saw the details of what their drone captured the next day.

“We saw a guy alive, lying in the traverse in the bottleneck. And people were stepping over him on the way to the summit. And there was no rescue mission

“I was really shocked. And I was really, I was really sad. I started to cry about the situation that people just passed him and there was no rescue mission,” Mr Steindl told the BBC.

Mr Hassan was being treated by one person “while everyone else” moved towards the summit in a “heated, competitive summit rush”, Mr Flämig told Austria’s Der Standard newspaper.

Ms Harila, however, has denied the accusations that Mr Hassan was left to die.

She said no-one was to blame for his death, adding that she had decided to make the statement to stop the spread of “misinformation and hatred”.

It is unclear what point of the incident the posted footage purports to show.

In an Instagram post describing what happened, the Norwegian climber says she had been walking when she saw the other team Mr Hassan was part of a few metres ahead before the “tragic accident” happened.

She said she did not see exactly what took place, but the next thing she knew, Mr Hassan “was hanging upside down” on a rope between two ice anchors, with his harness “all the way down around his knees. In addition, he was not wearing a down suit and his stomach was exposed to snow”.

Her team tried for an hour and a half to fasten a rope to the sherpa and give him oxygen and hot water, she recounted, until “an avalanche went off around the corner”.

Having established her team were safe, she said she understood more help was coming and decided to move forward to avoid overcrowding on the bottleneck. Her cameraman stayed behind to help until he himself ran low on oxygen.

“It was only when we came back down that we saw Hassan had passed and we were ourselves in no shape to carry his body down.”

She does not say if anyone was with the injured sherpa when her cameraman left, or when they passed his body upon their descent.

K2, along the Pakistan-China border, stands at 8,611m (28,251ft) and is regarded as one of the most challenging and dangerous mountains to climb.