Attaullah, 16, was travelling to school on Tuesday to collect his exam results, using a cable car to cross the ravine from his village – as he had done many times before. But when a cable broke and left him, five other children and two adults hanging precariously in the air hundreds of metres above a steep gorge, he said he had no hope he would survive.
“I was hell scared and all the children started screaming. We started holding each other as it kept dangling. I thought I was dead now,” he told the Guardian from the mountainous village of Allai.
The eight passengers were rescued in an operation that lasted more than 16 hours, including several unsuccessful rescue attempts in high winds and fading light.
The village in the mountainous Battagram district near Peshwar has a rough terrain, with one narrow steep road crossing through tributaries and a river, making the rescue even more difficult.
Videos of the rescue soon spread across social media. In one video, a local man moves down the cable and ties a child to himself to rescue him. Another video shows the rope swaying wildly as the child is secured by a belt around him and is pulled into the helicopter by the military.
The remaining passengers were rescued using a chairlift fashioned out of a bed frame: local experts along with soldiers moved to the car using the remaining cable as a zipline….
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/23/pakistan-cable-car-survivors-describe-ordeal
After the truth-shower 