Jonathan Kellerman: The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

Benitez was shocked. If he were out for fame, as Rogers claimed, he was going about it the wrong way, requesting that ExWeb keep his name out of it.

Then Brice stunned Benitez further. Not only had Brice harangued him for sending the e-mail; he and his team had treated the Chinese soldiers who killed Kelsang for snow blindness shortly after the shooting. Now Benitez went on the offensive: “So, basically, you’ve been treating the people who were doing the shooting?”

Benitez retreated to his tent, but 45 minutes later Brice and Rogers returned with a third man, climbing operator Henry Todd. During his whole career Benitez had always had “great respect” for Todd, and had often sought his advice.

“You should be fucking hung out to dry for what you have done,” Todd yelled at Benitez. Todd, a.k.a. the Toddfather, is a large, ruby-faced man known for his vicious temper; he’s an excon, having served seven years in jail for possession of LSD as part of a massive drug sting in Britain in the late 1970s. In 2000 Todd violently assaulted one of his own clients, an American reporter named Finn-Olaf Jones, who felt so threatened by the incident that he took a helicopter out of camp a few days later. Nepalese authorities banned Todd from Nepal for two years. Since then he changed the name of his company from Himalayan Guides to Ice 8000, and is now in operation in China. Having been cast out by the Nepalis before, Todd didn’t want to get banned by the Chinese, too.

“I think your name has been given to the Chinese,” Todd hissed, trying to intimidate Benitez. “If I were you I would leave ahead of your group, or you will get them into trouble.” Eventually the three left, but from that moment on, Benitez kept to himself. (Neither Brice nor Todd responded to repeated requests for comment.)

Benitez and his clients made it to Kathmandu. Border guards didn’t detain them, but Benitez was indeed a wanted man. Word was, the Chinese embassy wanted to talk to him, along with two other British climbers, including Steve Lawes. Hoping to leave Nepal without further confrontations, Benitez holed up in the Radisson hotel in Kathmandu. On October 7, doubts assailing him- What if these people really were people traffickers? Maybe I put my career on the line for nothing …-his phone rang. Unsure of who knew he’d checked in to the Radisson, he didn’t know if he should answer.

THE ROMANIAN WHO’D TAKEN THE VIDEO of the shooting, Sergiu Matei, faced his own anxious journey to safety. He knew that he had incontrovertible proof that Chinese riflemen had shot an unarmed teenager in the back. He stashed the tape in a belt pouch, and burned a hole in the casing of the cassette with a cigarette to make it look like an ashtray.

At the New Delhi airport a man with a gun under his coat approached Matei, saying he was with the Austrian embassy. He asked him what his occupation was and if he’d been on Cho Oyu. “I’m a dentist,” Matei lied. “I was on Annapurna.” It seemed to satisfy the man, whoever he was, and he left. “I was shitting my pants,” said Matei. “On the mountain, if they had caught me with that tape, I thought I would be shot on the spot, and the Chinese would have said a Romanian had died in an avalanche. It made me hate communism and the idea of communism.”

On October 12, 2006, the Chinese released a statement citing an unnamed official who claimed that soldiers had found “stowaways” and tried to “persuade them to go back to their home. But the stowaways refused and attacked the soldiers.” The official said that “the frontier soldiers were forced to defend themselves and injured two stowaways.” The report added: “One injured person died later in hospital due to oxygen shortage on the 6,200-meter high land.” (In August 2007, the top Chinese general in Tibet was reportedly forced into early retirement over the incident.)

On October 13, Matei’s footage aired on Pro TV in Romania and was quickly screened by the BBC, CNN, and other networks worldwide. (It can now be seen on YouTube.) Diplomats from around the world condemned the Chinese actions-none more forcefully than Clark Randt, the U.S. ambassador in Beijing.

Away from news cameras, says the International Campaign for Tibet, some of the captured refugees reported being beaten with rubber hoses and electric cattle prods. Police questioned the children, and Chinese officials later claimed that they had been sent to India to be “trained” by the Dalai Lama, then sent back to China as “splitists,” who want to see Tibet independent. Some of the youngest children were not collected by their parents and so remained in custody for three months. When their parents came they were fined 100 to 500 yuan ($13-$66).

Dolma, who witnessed her best friend’s death, made it to freedom in Dharamsala, India, where the exiled Tibetan government is based. She met the Dalai Lama and is today pursuing a secular education; she may later join a nunnery. She sat in a green park and gazed out at the Himalayas. Her hands clasped under her thighs, she rocked back and forth as tears rolled down her cheeks. “Kelsang would have been pleased that I made it,” she said. Kelsang’s body was never returned to her family.

AFTER SEVERAL RINGS, Benitez snatched the telephone from its cradle. Instead of a Chinese agent, it was Kate Saunders, from the International Campaign for Tibet. She offered to assuage his fears that he’d been misinformed by letting him meet 43 Tibetans.

In an SUV with smoked windows, Benitez and a Tibetan ICT representative drove along Kathmandu’s bustling backstreets to the Tibetan Refugee Reception Center, on the eastern edge of the city. There he saw monks sitting in prayer alongside families with children in cheap, tattered sneakers. He looked at snapshots covering an entire wall outside of the medical clinic. Many were painful to see, as they depicted the horrific frostbite many Tibetans suffered, their toes and fingers blackened, as they made it over the Nangpa La Pass. He met many of the refugees; any doubts he’d had about interfering with policing human traffickers quickly dissipated. He wept for a moment before regaining his composure.

In May 2007, Benitez made it to the top of Everest for a sixth time, and he did it from the Nepal side. Normally wasted but ecstatic atop the roof of the world, Benitez says that this time he experienced disappointment.

“I realized I’m not a fireman or a policeman or anyone else who saves lives,” he says. “I’m just a mountaineer, part of a substrata of society that people can’t peg. What happened on Cho Oyu made me realize that there’s something more important than just reaching the summit. So I stood on top of Everest and thought, What’s the point of this?”

JONATHAN GREEN is an award-winning journalist who has reported on jihadist militias in Sudan, corruption in oil-rich Kazakhstan, the destruction of the rainforest in the Borneo jungle, and Tibetan refugees in the high Himalaya, among other subjects and places. He has won several journalism awards, including the American Society of Journalists and Authors award for reporting on a significant topic for his piece “Hooked on the Gold Rush,” an investigation into human rights violations connected with gold mining in west Africa.

He has written for Men’s Journal, the New York Times, Best Life, Reader’s Digest, British GQ, and Esquire, among many other publications. He is writing a book based on this piece, Murder in the High Himalaya, which will be forthcoming from PublicAffairs.

Coda

Shortly after the shooting, my editor at the Mail on Sunday espied a small newspaper item on the incident. She called me to see if there was a deeper story worth investigating. I knew nothing about Tibet, but discovered that the murdered nun was just one of thousands of refugees fleeing oppression to freedom along a well-trodden trail. What was extraordinary was that while many wanted to flee the oppression, others would risk everything to meet the Dalai Lama in exile in northern India only to return to Tibet. For some Tibetan Buddhists, meeting the Dalai Lama for even a few short seconds is worth risking their lives on the high passes and against the guns of Chinese soldiers.