In reply to mh554:
Yeah, read that this morning.
I knew about the "bad blood" between the Italian climbers, seems to have been a part of their scene in the 1950s, but didn't realise that Mehdi wasn't equipped with HA kit. When I went to Pakistan in the 1980s the rules stated that any local who went beyond base camp had to be equipped to the same standard as the climbing team, possibly this came about following the K2 incident.
I'm sure Luca who posts on here occasionally has written about Bonatti's exclusion by the Italian climbing establishment.