“It’s all there in the drone footage,” Flamig 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 Harila.
“Such a thing would be unthinkable in the Alps. He was treated like a second-class human being,” Steindl added.
“If he had been a Westerner, he would have been rescued immediately. No one felt responsible for him,” he said.
“What happened there is a disgrace. A living human was left lying so that records could be set,” he said.
Harila defended her actions on Thursday, saying that her team did everything they could to save Hassan.
“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,” she told the Telegraph.
“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,” she said.
She also denied that Hassan would have been treated any differently if he were a Western climber.
“We did all we could for him,” she said.
Reports by several climbers have raised questions about the standard of equipment that Hassan had been provided with before he set off up the mountain ahead of the Western climbers, who often pay thousands of dollars for a guided ascent.
Harila said when her team found Hassan he was not wearing either gloves or a down jacket and didn’t appear to have been given oxygen.
“If he were my Sherpa I wouldn’t have sent him up in that condition,” she said.
According to Steindl, who visited the porter’s family after descending the mountain, Hassan took the perilous job of rope fixer to pay for his diabetic mother’s medical bills, even though he lacked the experience to perform the job.
Loading
“His family cannot afford medicine or food. Ms Harila and many of the climbers flew over us and the family in helicopters. What a symbolic image. The helicopter to fly out costs up to $12,000 per person,” he said.
Thaneswar Gurugai, the general manager of Seven Summits which organised Harila’s trek, told the Telegraph that Hassan was suffering from frostbite and hyperthermia when he died.
“In normal cases [other porters] would save them unless it is quite impossible to do.”
The Telegraph, London
#Mountaineer #defends #climbing #dying #Sherpa #pursuit #world #record
