Wasfia Nazreen, the second Bangladeshi woman to conquer the Mount Everest, flanked by two other mountaineers Nishat Mazumder and MA Mohit, poses on her arrival at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in the capital on Saturday. — Sourav Lasker

Wasfia Nazreen, the second Bangladeshi woman to conquer world’s tallest peak Mount Everest, has dedicated her feat to the women’s rights activists of the country.
‘This is not only my achievement. I could not have done it without the support of the people of my country,’ she told reporters after her plane landed at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in the capital at 1:25pm on Saturday.
‘I’m dedicating my victory to those associated with women’s rights movement.’
Following her arrival in the country, Wasfia visited and paid her respect to the martyred intellectuals of 1971 liberation war at the memorial at the capital’s Rayer Bazar.
On May 26, the 29-year-old mountaineer reached the 8,850-meter high (29,035 ft) summit of Mount Everest from the southern side at 6:26am (Nepal time) with Ngima Girmen Sherpa and Da Kusang Sherpa.
From the top of the world, she said she had dedicated the feat to the resilience of the women in Bangladesh.
Wasfia is the fourth Bangladeshi mountaineer to hoist Bangladesh’s flag on the top of Everest just a week after Nishat Mazumder did it as the first Bangladeshi woman.
Asked whether she ever thought of retreating after facing fearsome obstacles on her journey to the peak of Everest, Wasfia told reporters, ‘I never thought of retreating. But yes, there were times when I thought I would die.’
‘An avalanche had totally covered Camp-3 just a while after we left the place for Camp-4. We would have died if we were still there,’ she said while sharing some of her experience.
Also one Sherpa had saved her life when she slipped from the track, Wasfia added.
Expressing her feelings about the moment when she achieved the feat, Wasfia said, ‘It was 6:25am (Nepal time) and sun was rising when I set my foot on the peak. I could see the summit of the 8,481-metre high (27,825 ft) Mountain Makalu from there.’
‘I could look at it from top. It’s impossible to express the beauty in words.’
Wasfia, a rights activist, writer and development practitioner, said she wanted to promote the women freedom fighter who fought bravely for Bangladesh’s independence in 1971.
‘We have failed to give proper respect to them yet after 40 years of independence. I want to tell the world about them from the highest peaks of all the continents,’ she said.
As Bangladesh turned 40 last year, Wasfia ventured into climbing the seven summits, the highest mountains in each of the seven continents through the ‘Bangladesh on Seven Summits’ campaign in July 2011.
As part of this effort, last year she climbed the 5895-metre-high Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa in October and near-seven kilometre high Mount Aconcagua in Argentina in December, the second highest of the Seven summits.
She also called on the country’s young generation to quit any practice of corruption and dirty political view in order to work for the betterment of the country.
Wasfia announced that she would open a mountaineering training centre for women in the country for practical training. ‘I hope the centre will be launched in 2013. Initially, 50 women will be included in the training programme.’
She congratulated Nishat Mazumder, the first Bangladeshi women to conquer Mount Everest. ‘When she ascended to the Everest summit, I was at Camp-3. This is a matter of pride to have two Bangladeshi women to conquer Mount Everest in one week.’
Nishat scaled Everest’s summit on May 19 from the northern side of the mountain in Nepal with MA Mohit, the second Bangladeshi to have conquered the Everest.
Earlier on May 24, 2010 Musa Ibrahim became the first Bangladeshi to scale the summit.
Mohit is the first Bangladeshi to scale the mountain twice. He first scaled the mountain peak on May 21 last year.