Pakistan's renowned mountaineer Sadpara, two others go missing while attempting to summit K2
- 06 Feb 2021
Gulf Today Report
Three climbers have gone missing attempting to summit the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, their expedition manager and the Alpine Club of Pakistan said on Saturday.
Climbers John Snorri from Iceland, Juan Pablo Mohr from Chile and Muhammad Ali Sadpara from Pakistan reportedly lost contact with base camp on Friday.
“It’s already been more than 30 hours, we (at basecamp) have received no news of John Snorri, Ali Sadpara, and Juan Pablo Mohr, since none of the GPS trackers seem to be working,” Chhang Dawa Sherpa, their expedition manager, said in a statement.
Ali Sadpara had successfully climbed the 8,611-metre-high peak during the K2 Winter Expedition 2021, a month after their first attempt failed, Geo News said in a report.
The report said that Sadpara and his team had departed for their journey on Wednesday. Since then, he has since been providing updates on his Twitter account about the expedition.
An army helicopter has conducted a search flight for the missing climbers, Sherpa said in a separate statement. “Unfortunately, they cannot trace anything and the condition up in the mountain and even at the basecamp is getting poor,” he said.
Karrar Haidri, Secretary of the Alpine Club of Pakistan, also told reporters that the climbers had gone missing on the mountain.
News of the missing men comes a day after a Bulgarian mountaineer was confirmed to have died on K2. He is the third mountaineer to die on K2’s slopes this year, after a Spanish climber fell to his death last month.
Russian-American Alex Goldfarb also died on a nearby mountain during an acclimatising mission in January. A team of Nepali climbers made history on K2 last month when they became the first to scale it in winter.