By Staff Reporter
GILGIT: A rescue team has brought the bodies of the celebrated climber Nirmal Purja and three members of his expedition down to the base camp of Broad Peak, the Pakistani mountain on which they died in an avalanche last week, the Alpine Club of Pakistan has confirmed.
The avalanche struck on 30 July, severing contact with the 10-strong international team led by the 43-year-old British-Nepali mountaineer on the world’s 12th-highest peak. Purja’s company later confirmed that nobody on the expedition had survived.
In a statement posted on social media on Wednesday, the Alpine Club of Pakistan said the recovery operation had been “exceptionally challenging and technically demanding”. It confirmed that the bodies of Purja, the Chinese climber Zhong Wang, and the Nepali climbers Nima Sherpa and Kilu Sherpa had been brought down safely to base camp.
“While today marks an important milestone, three climbers remain missing,” the club said. “We remain committed to supporting all possible efforts to locate and recover them, whenever conditions allow, so that they too may be returned home to their loved ones.”
Three other members of the expedition — an American woman, an Omani woman and a Nepali man — had already been flown off the mountain to Skardu in the days after the avalanche. The bodies of the Pakistani mountaineer Sohail Sakhi, from Hunza, and two Nepali nationals have yet to be recovered.
Funeral prayers were said in absentia for Sakhi in his hometown of Aliabad in Hunza on Monday, where hundreds gathered to pay tribute to the young mountaineer and offer condolences to his family.
The deaths have sent shockwaves through the international climbing community. Tul Singh Gurung, president of Nepal’s National Mountain Guide Association, said the tragedy meant they had “lost a generation of accomplished mountaineers”.
The Alpine Club of Pakistan said the four recovered bodies would now be returned to their families. “We hope this recovery brings them a measure of peace and the opportunity to lay their loved ones to rest with the dignity they deserve,” it said.
Major General (retd) Irfan Arshad Khan, the club’s president, said the climbers would be airlifted from base camp to Skardu by helicopter, an operation that had been grounded for three days by poor weather.
The club thanked those who had led and supported the rescue effort, including the ground recovery team headed by the veteran Nepali climber Mingma G and supported by the Pakistani mountaineer Sirbaz Khan, along with the wider Pakistani and Nepali recovery teams, the Pakistan Army, the governments of Pakistan and Gilgit-Baltistan, local authorities, the British High Commission and the Nepali embassy.
Mingma David Sherpa, Purja’s business partner and a member of Nepal’s House of Representatives, who has been overseeing the search from Pakistan, praised the “courage, professionalism and selfless commitment” shown by the recovery team.
“We are deeply grateful to every member of the team for carrying out this mission under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions,” he said. “Our thoughts also remain with the families of the three climbers who are still missing. We remain committed to supporting every possible effort to bring them home when conditions safely allow.”
Broad Peak, in Pakistan’s Karakoram range, is regarded as one of the most technically demanding of the world’s 14 mountains standing above 8,000 metres. Purja rose to international fame in 2019 after summiting all of them in under seven months, smashing a record that had previously stood at nearly eight years.
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