It started out a routine Tuesday morning. Car mechanic Gulfaraz had planned to accompany his nephew to school and then go home.
They made the journey as they had done for years - on a makeshift cable car that would take them across the steep Allai valley in the northwest of Pakistan.
But minutes into their ride, two cables supporting their car snapped.
They were trapped in the car with six other passengers, dangling hundreds of metres above the ground, buffeted by gusty winds.
"It felt like we were standing right at the edge of our own graves," Gulfaraz, 20, told ONNTV the next day. "We had little to no hope that we could be saved."
The cable wires snapped at about 07:30 local time (02:30 GMT), but it was not until 14 hours later that all eight people - six teenagers among them - were pulled to safety in a complex operation involving at least four helicopters and a team of zip wire experts.
Many of the trapped passengers did not think they would survive.
"I thought it was my last day and I will be no more," one of the rescued boys, Attaullah Shah, told AFP.
"God has granted me a second life," the 15-year-old said.
Cable chair lifts are often used for commuting in this area, deep in the mountains of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
For students, the cable cars cut a two-hour road journey through mountainous terrain - from their village homes in Jhangra to school in Batangi - to just five minutes.
It was Gulfaraz who raised the alarm on Tuesday morning. Suspended in the air, he used his mobile phone to inform his family and friends about what had happened.
Residents used loudspeakers to alert officials, but it took at least four hours for the first rescue helicopter to arrive.
Hanging by a thread
It was a delicate operation for the choppers. They could not approach the cable car too closely, fearing their rotor blades might destabilise it further.
Each time a rescuer was lowered towards the car, it would shake, leading the children to scream in fear, eyewitnesses told local media.
Recalling the agony of the situation, Gulfaraz said: "Once when the helicopter came close to rescue the kids, the rescuer's rope got stuck with the cable car.
"And it started swaying with the helicopter, we toppled upside down, the ones who were sitting fell off their seats, the ones who were standing fell down.
"I was really stressed out myself and I had to take care of the kids too. They were very scared, some were screaming, others were crying," he said.
A child said to have a heart condition had fainted, he added.
Drone footage obtained by the ONNTV shows passengers piled on top of one another, clinging to their seats, many looking visibly distressed. The car was suspended lopsided with its doors flung open.
By then, anxious crowds, including relatives of those trapped, had gathered on both sides of the ravine. Parents begged officials to save their children while other onlookers watched with bated breath as military choppers attempted the rescue.
Local police officers told the ONNTV the scene was "complete chaos".
After several failed attempts, a helicopter finally lifted one child off the car. Footage online shows the child clinging on to a rope suspended from the chopper, swinging mid-air for 20 seconds before being pulled into the helicopter.
By then, it was about 19:00 local time and the rescue mission hit another hurdle: helicopter operations had to be suspended because of poor weather and darkness.
As night fell, hopes faded of rescuing the rest of the group.
