Kharkiv Governor Mykhailo Dobkin and Mayor Gennadiy Kernes on June 30 attended the funerals for three murdered Ukrainian mountaineers, who were laid to rest in their hometown following a vicious terrorist act eight days earlier. In total, 11 people were brutally killed during the attack in Pakistan.
As a group of climbers rested at Nanga Parbat mountain base camp, Pakistan’s second highest peak, 15 Islamic militants dressed in police uniforms attacked the group, ordered them to their knees and then shot them execution style. Eleven were killed, including 10 tourists and their guide. Among them were three Ukrainians, two Slovakians, two Chinese, one Lithuanian, a Nepalese, and one Chinese-American, as reported by the home secretary of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan’s northernmost region where the incident occurred.
“I’m not American. I am not American,” Ernest Marksaitis, the Lithuanian climber was quoted by National geographic as saying moments before the group was executed in an interview with a climber who survived.
The three Ukrainians – Ihor Sverhun, Badavi Kashaev, and Dmytro Konyaev – were all from Kharkiv, the nation’s second largest city, and were members of the Kharkiv AlpClub. Their bodies were repatriated to Ukraine on June 28. Seven other Ukrainian members of the expedition who were higher up the mountain returned with them.
The senseless murders shocked the world, and because Nanga Parbat was thought to be among the safest places in the country for foreigners to visit. Travelers and members of climbing communities around the world expressed their condolences this week, as did the government of Pakistan.
“The government of Pakistan expresses its deep sense of shock and grief on this brutal act of terrorism, and extends its sympathy to the families of the victims,” it said in a written statement on its website.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, this incident isn’t expected to complicate bilateral relations with Pakistan. The Pakistani government provided the airplane that brought the bodies of the victims home.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said it is still negotiating the issue of compensation for the families of the victims through its embassy in Islamabad.
Zafar Ikbal, acting Pakistani ambassador to Ukraine, also expressed doubt that bilateral relations will be affected by this. “Ukraine understands that Pakistan itself is a victim of terrorism,” he told the Kyiv Post.
He confirmed that there have been talks of compensation, but no resolution has been reached. The Pakistani ambassador said he was in no position to comment on whether there will be compensation.
“In normal circumstances, a compensation means that we did something wrong, and we need to compensate,” he explained.
Junud-e-Hafsa, a previously unknown faction of the Taliban, claimed responsibility for the killings. A spokesman for the group told the Associated Press, “by killing foreigners, we wanted to give a message to the world to play their role in bringing an end to the drone attacks.”
Zafar said that the Pakistani government is conducting a thorough investigation with the help of locals in the Gilgit-Baltistan region where the group is believed to be hiding.
“There were even a few arrests, but it was no one central to this incident,” he said.
If caught, the perpetrators could face the death penalty for their crimes, according to Pakistani law.
Gennadiy Kopeyka, chairman of the Kharkiv AlpClub, said that there were two groups of expeditions with Ukrainians in them: one with five Kharkiv residents, and one with five Kyivans. The expedition was supposed to be about a month long, reaching the 8,125-meter-high Nanga Parbat peak in the early dates of July. At the time of the attack, the expedition had stopped at the second base camp, where it was adjusting to the altitude and climate, as well as preparing for the next leg of the trip.
Kopeyka said this was the first time they had sent climbers on this specific path in nearly 16 years, but that he couldn’t have anticipated anything like what happened.
“Mountain climbers are a source of revenue for the local population because they bring with them possible jobs for the locals, so there was never any enmity towards them in any regions or any mountains of the world,” says Kopeyka.
When reached by telephone, the family of one of the victims declined to comment on the incident.
The surviving members of the group seem no longer to feel safe in Pakistan, despite the incident being the first of its kind in the region. In an interview with National Geographic, Aleksandra Dzik, a climber from the second expedition group which wasn’t attacked, disclosed that even though they were aware of the risks in Pakistan, it never seemed to concern them as tourists.
“We believed that we are untouchable,” she said. “Now we do not feel safe on the streets, but we try to behave normally anyway,” because as she asserts, “it’s the only thing we can do against terrorism. Not to give terrorists what they want—to make us hide.”
Kyiv Post intern Sergey Bokhnyak can be reached at [email protected].
