Kenyan climber Cheruiyot Kirui found dead metres from Everest summit

Cheruiyot Kirui, the Kenyan climber who went missing on Wednesday during an expedition to Mount Everest, has been found dead.

Organisers said that Kirui’s body was found a few metres below the Everest summit point.

“He was on a daring mission to reach the summit without supplemental oxygen and was accompanied by a Nepali climber Nawang Sherpa, whose fate is still unknown,” said a Thursday report by the Nepali mountaineering news website Everest Today.

Kirui, a banker working with the Kenya Commercial Bank, went missing with his guide Sherpa.

Officials from Seven Summit Treks (SST), a mountaineering company based in Kathmandu, Nepal, reportedly lost contact with Kirui and his guide at Bishop Rock, located at an altitude of 8,000 metres.

Everest is Earth's highest mountain, with an elevation of 8,848.86 meters above sea level.

It is located across the China-Nepal border.

In an interview last month, Kirui said climbing Everest with supplemental oxygen would be quite easy, and that was not what he wanted.

“The challenge for me would be without supplemental oxygen; otherwise, I wouldn't feel like I've achieved much. So, I want to see how my body can cope in such altitude,” Kirui said then.

“Climbers who ascend higher than 8,000 metres on Mount Everest enter the ‘death zone.’ In this area, oxygen is so limited that the body's cells start to die, and judgment becomes impaired.”

He added: "There, your body is not structured to survive with that oxygen concentration, which is around a third of what is at sea level. The idea is that when you are there, you get to the summit as fast as possible and then down before your body starts shutting down or dying."

Kirui said he had climbed Kenya’s highest mountain, Mount Kenya (5,199 metres above sea level), over 15 times.

"I've lost count… I climb up and down in less than seven hours. It has become relatively easier over the years," he said at the time.

He had also scaled Kilimanjaro, which is Africa’s tallest mountain at 5,895 metres high.