Video of Mountaineer Walking Past Dying Sherpa at K2 Summit Sparks Backlash

A video of mountaineers walking past an injured sherpa who eventually died on the K2 mountain in Pakistan has sparked a backlash.

The video showed mountaineers stepping over Pakistani porter Mohammad Hassan, 27, who had fallen while setting up ropes for climbers, during a climb on July 27, 2023, according to reports.

Norwegian climber Kristin Harila and her team have especially faced criticism online. She and her group were able to beat the record for the fastest climb of the 14 mountains when they reached the summit of K2 on this date.

Harila's celebratory video upon the summit, which she posted on Instagram, has been bombarded with comments critical of her with some calling it a "worthless" achievement due to her team's alleged inaction.

On August 10, Harila took to Instagram with her side of the story and insisted that she, along with members of her team, attempted to help Hassan after his fall and explained the video footage of the mountaineers stepping over the porter. Newsweek has contacted Harila via Instagram for comment.

Wilhelm Steindl, an Austrian climber who called off his own ascent due to the poor conditions and avalanches spoke to the Austrian newspaper, Der Standard, about the incident and condemned the mountaineers who didn't help, including Harila's group.

'A Disgrace'

"He died miserably there. It would only have taken three or four people to bring him down. I wasn't at the scene of the accident. If I had seen it, I would have climbed up and helped the poor man," he said, according to a Google translation.

"What happened there is a disgrace. A living person is left behind so that records can be set."

Steindl noted that he did not go to the celebration that was held in the base camp for Harila's record, stating it "disgusted" him as "a person died up there." Newsweek has contacted Steindl for comment via a GoFundMe page he set up for Hassan.

Harila's Account of Events

In her Instagram post, Harila said she wanted to address what had happened after she and other mountaineers received criticism and death threats.

According to her recollection of the day, Hassan had fallen off an edge near the top of the summit known as the bottleneck, around 8,200 meters high, where the area is considered highly dangerous.

She said she had spent 90 minutes attempting to pull Hassan back up on the path before an avalanche went off and they received a distress call.

They then pushed forward after speaking with sherpas who they believed were going to get further help for Hassan.

"We decided to continue forward as too many people in the bottleneck would make it more dangerous for a rescue," she wrote in her post.

"Considering the amount of people that stayed behind and that had turned around, I believed Hassan would be getting all the help he could, and that he would be able to get down.

"We did not fully understand the gravity of everything that happened until later.

Harila said that her cameraman Gabriel had stayed with Hassan and had managed to make a pulling system. She said Gabriel and Hassan's friend continued to help pull Hassan up.

"As they did this, people were crossing them, trying to get away from the dangerous bottleneck that lies at 8,200m," she wrote.

"For an hour more, Gabriel stayed and tried to help. All he could do was to stay with him and talk to him. [He] had almost no oxygen left and realized that if he himself wanted to come home that day, he needed to fetch more oxygen."

Harila praised her cameraman for his efforts and said it is unlikely that many of the passersby understood the seriousness of the situation. She said, due to the location, fellow climbers would step over him in order to reach the safety on the other side.

Harila ended her message by highlighting the GoFundme page started by Steindl for Hassan's family and asked people to be kind.

Not the First Time

This comes only months after Malaysian climber Ravichandran faced backlash for allegedly snubbing a sherpa who saved his life on Everest by carrying him for six hours on his back to safety.

The sherpa hadn't been employed by Ravichandran but had halted his own client's expedition in favor of saving a stranger's life on a climb in May earlier this year.

Ravichandran allegedly dismissed the help he had received from the sherpa and blocked him on Instagram, causing an uproar in the mountaineering community.