In reply to subtle: His words from The Telegraph;
Mr Hussein, 26, a graduate aerospace engineer from Portsmouth, flew to Turin last Thursday and made his way towards the mountains by train and bus.
His plan was to celebrate his 26th birthday, on Saturday, by reaching the summit of Mt Blanc.
“I was fully prepared,” he said, dismissing reports in the Italian press that he had embarked on the climb in a tracksuit. “I had wet weather gear, an ice axe, crampons and ropes. My backpack weighed 25kg.”
After sleeping in his tent on Friday night he resumed his climb on Saturday, but soon got into difficulty after getting lost and straying from the path to the summit.
He stumbled into an area of crevasses and after several hours of walking, fell into one which he estimated as being 15m to 20m deep, badly injuring his leg. “I thought, that’s it, I’m dead.” But using his ice axe and crampons he managed to climb out of it. “It took all my strength to get out of it. My leg was twisted really badly and I couldn’t walk anymore.”
As darkness fell, he put up his tent, crawled inside his sleeping bag and called the emergency number. “Alpine rescue said that because of the bad weather they wouldn’t be able to reach me until the morning. It was snowing hard, really windy. I told them I don’t think I’ll survive that long, that I’m going to die, but that they shouldn’t worry because it was not their fault.
He said he got out of the tent at some point and then passed out face down on the ice. “I felt that was my last moment. I was really, really cold.”
The next thing he remembers is waking up in hospital, having been rescued by a helicopter on Sunday morning. He spent the next two days in intensive care and was given oxygen to breathe.
On the mountainside his body temperature had dropped to just 25 degrees Celsius – more than 10 degrees less than normal.
