INSIDE THE NANGA PARBAT MURDERS

One of the worst massacres in mountaineering history happened this summer in Pakistan. Will it happen again?

On the evening of June 22, some 16 to 20 local villagers disguised as Gilgit paramilitary officers hiked into base camp on the Diamir side of Pakistan’s 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, the ninth-tallest mountain on earth, shouting in English: “Taliban! Al Quaeda! Surrender! Some fifty climbers from many different countries were on the mountain at the time, and more than a dozen were hanging out at base, waiting for better weather and acclimatizing before heading up to higher camps. The intruders roused these mountaineers from their tents, tied them up, and forced them onto their knees at gunpoint.

The attackers first demanded money. Interviewed by Peter Miller forNational Geographic, Sehr Khan, a Pakistani climber in camp at the time, recalled one of the men saying, “We know you can speak English. Ask them who has money in their tents.” Khan continued: “Everybody was scared. We all said, ‘Yes, we have money.’ The foreigners said, ‘Yes, we have Euros. Yes, we have dollars.’ And, one by one, they took climbers to their different tents and collected the money.”

The intruders next destroyed all the cell phones, satellite phones, and two-way radios they could find. “[S]uddenly, I heard the sound of shooting,” Kahn recounted. “I looked a little up and what I saw was this poor Ukrainian guy, who had been tied with me, I saw him sitting down. Then after that moment, the shooting started in bursts. Brrrr. Brrrr. Brrrr. Three times like that. Then the leader, this stupid ugly man, said, ‘Now stop firing. Don’t fire anybody.’ Then that son of a bitch came in between the dead bodies and he personally shot them one by one. Dun. Dun. Dun. Afterward we heard slogans, like ‘Allahu Akbar,’ ‘Salam Zindabad,’ ‘Osama bin Laden Zindabad.’”

Several of the climbers pleaded, “I am not American! I am not American!,” to no avail. In the midst of the carnage, one of the few survivors heard an assassin proclaim, “Today, these people are revenge for Osama bin Laden.” Yet only one of the victims was an American citizen, and he was Chinese-born. Two others were Chinese, three were Ukrainians, two Slovaks, one Lithuanian, and one a Sherpa from Nepal. The cook was a Pakistani. In all, 11 people were killed.

Within days of the massacre, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a Sunni Muslim branch unaffiliated with the Afghan Taliban, claimed responsibility for the deed. A spokesman said that the motive was revenge for the death, by an American drone strike, of the group’s second-in-command, and that the action had been carried out by a splinter faction of the TTP called the Jundul Hafsa. The Pakistani cook was apparently shot because the attackers assumed he was Shia. Sher Kahn believes he survived only because his name sounded to the killers like a Sunni cognomen, even though Khan is actually an Ismaili Shia.

In the more than two-century-long history of mountaineering, the murder of more than two or three climbers under any circumstances was utterly unprecedented. In fact, the killing of backcountry adventurers is so rare an event that the isolated examples resonate long afterward. In 1998, mountaineer and explorer Ned Gillette was shot and killed in his tent while trekking in Kashmir. But what was originally thought to be a terrorist act turned out to be a simple robbery gone wrong. Others were reminded of the four young American climbers who were shot out of their bivouac on a big wall in Kyrgyzstan in 2000, then taken captive, as chronicled by Greg Child in Outside and his book, Over the Edge. But in that case, the climbers were useful to the Kyrgyz insurgents who seized them only as hostages to be used as bargaining chips with the government—not as victims in a Muslim vendetta against the United States.

The Nanga Parbat massacre, however, bore spooky similarities to the 1995 kidnapping of six foreign tourists in Kashmir by a militant Islamic group called Al-Faran. In that case, one American managed to escape. The beheaded body of a Norwegian hostage was later discovered, but the other four victims were never seen again. A captured rebel not involved in the Al-Faran kidnapping later reported that he had heard that the four were shot to death after the kidnappers’ demands fell on deaf ears.

Nonetheless, the Nanga Parbat tragedy struck many observers as heralding a new and darker order of threat to adventurers afoot in Muslim countries. “It’s a game-changer, for sure,” claims one savvy observer of Central Asia.