Five Russian mountaineers were killed while climbing in Nepal, a tourism official said Tuesday, two days after the team lost contact while on the world’s seventh-highest mountain, Dhaulagiri.
Rakesh Gurung, from Nepal’s tourism department, said the team went missing late on the evening of Oct. 6 during an attempt to summit the 8,167-meter (26,795 feet) Himalayan peak.
“Five dead bodies were discovered by a helicopter rescue team,” Gurung told AFP. “They fell from 7,700 meters.”
He said one climber who quit the summit attempt had been rescued from the mountain, and had “been admitted to hospital” in the capital Kathmandu.
Hundreds of people from around the world travel to the Himalayas each year for the fall climbing season in Nepal.
Nepal is home to eight of the world’s 14 highest peaks and foreign climbers that flock to its mountains are a major source of revenue for the country.
The rapid growth of the climbing industry has created fierce competition among companies for business, and also raised fears that some are cutting corners on safety.
Dhaulagiri’s peak was first scaled in 1960 by a Swiss-Austrian team and has since been climbed by hundreds of people.