What happened

Nepal revoked the Everest summit certificates of two Indian climbers for faking the 2016 ascent, and banned them along with their team leader from mountaineering in the country for the next six years, officials reported.

What you need to know

Narender Singh Yadav and Seema Rani Goswami claimed they reached the top of the world’s highest mountain in the 2016 spring season, which Nepal’s tourism department certified at the time

However, when Yadav was vilified for winning India’s prestigious Tenzing Norgay Adventure Award last year and Indian mountaineers and media erupted in outrage, sharing analyses of Yadav’s photographic evidence of the 2016 ascent that pointed to the photos being altered.

The award was retracted from Yadav, and a probe began. Nepal’s tourism ministry spokesman Tara Nath Adhikari told AFP news agency on Wednesday their investigations and inquiries with other climbers revealed that the two “never reached the summit”.

What else

“They couldn’t produce any evidence of their ascent to the peak… they even failed to submit reliable photos of them at the summit,” Adhikari said.

The current system demands photos as well as reports from team leaders and government liaison officers stationed at the base camp – but it has been open to attempts at fakery.