Pakistan was forced again to call off a search party for Westerners missing nearly a week in the Karakoram Mountains as hopes faded for their safe recovery, officials said on Wednesday. “We were on standby the whole day today, but the weather is very bad and helicopters had to abandon the mission,” Colonel Manzoor Ahmed, President of the Pakistan Alpine Club, told AFP. The members of an international winter expedition to Gasherbrum-1 peak, team leader Gerfried Goschl of Austria, Swiss climber Cedric Hahlen and a Pakistani high altitude porter Nisar Hussain, have been missing since Friday. It is the highest peak in the Karakoram range on the Pakistan-China border, also known as “Hidden Peak”. “It has been a long time now.
They were last spotted around 450 metres short of the summit on Friday. Something went wrong after that. They had two Thuraya sets (satellite phones) and they would have called us soon after scaling the peak,” Ahmed said. “But I think they had some accident and could not reach the summit. They might have been hit by an avalanche or strong wind.”
