An expedition team located the bodies of three mountaineers who lost their lives in February while attempting to scale K-2, the world's second-highest mountain peak, authorities said Monday.
The remains of the ill-fated climbers, including Pakistan's iconic climber Muhammad Ali Sadpara, Iceland's John Snorri and Chile’s Juan Pablo Mohr, were found at a height of 8,611 meters (28,251 feet) near the bottleneck spot at K-2, Karrar Haidri, secretary of the Alpine Club of Pakistan, the country's official mountaineering organization, told Anadolu Agency.
The bodies, he said, had been spotted by the international expedition team and Pakistan Army helicopters are assisting the mountaineers in bringing them down.
"It is very difficult to bring the dead bodies down from such a high altitude without aviation support," Haidri said.
The bodies of Snorri and Pablo will be transported to their respective homelands as requested by their families, he added.
The trio was attempting to reach the Korakarum-2 summit, commonly known as K-2, without supplemental oxygen to make history.
They, however, lost contact with the base camp when they were only 411 meters (1,348 feet) away from the snow-capped top.
The daunting K-2, also known as the "savage mountain" due to its treacherous terrain, had never been scaled in the winter until last month when a 10-member Nepali team scaled the peak for the first time in history.
It is the last peak of the 8,000-meter club to have been climbed in the winter, 41 years after Mount Everest, which was scaled in 1980 during the winter.
Some 300 mountaineers have made it to the top before, but all of them took up the challenge in either the summer or spring.
Even in relatively better weather conditions, 86 climbers have lost their lives while trying to scale the mountain, which towers over Shigar district in the northern Gilgit-Baltistan region, home to six peaks with altitudes of over 8,000 meters, including K-2.
