A two-member expedition team, comprising Polish mountaineer Tomek Mackiewicz and Frenchwoman Elisabeth Revol, appears to have gone missing while trying to scale Nanga Parbat, according to sources.
They said that nobody had been able to contact the two climbers once the pair had reached an altitude of 8,000 metres on Thursday.
The severing of communication with the team at such a high altitude was considered to be dangerous for the mountaineers, the sources said.
The two-member team attempting to reach the summit of Nanga Parbat in winter had started their expedition on Jan 8, the sources said.
The Polish media said the two mountaineers had reached an altitude of 7,300 metres and wanted to reach the summit on Thursday. They said that people at the base camp were extremely concerned about the safety of the two climbers.
Nanga Parbat has been nicknamed “Killer Mountain”. On June 27 last year, two alpinists, a Spaniard and an Argentinian, had gone missing while attempting to summit the peak in northern Pakistan. “Alberto Zerain, a Spanish alpinist, and Mariano Galvan, an Argentinian national, went missing while trying to climb Nanga Parbat,” the world’s ninth highest mountain, Alpine Club of Pakistan spokesman Karrar Haidri had told AFP.
The 8,125-metre-high peak earned its grisly nickname after more than 30 climbers died trying to conquer it before the first successful summit in 1953.
Meanwhile, in 2013, gunmen shot dead 10 foreign climbers and their Pakistani guide at the Nanga Parbat base camp – one American with dual Chinese citizenship, two other Chinese, three Ukrainians, two Slovakians, one Lithuanian and one Nepalese.
