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A British tourist, running for his life, captured the moment his trekking tour group survived a spectacular avalanche in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

Harry Shimmin, who had broken away from the group to take photos minutes before, filmed the snow and rock cascading down the Tian Shan cliff edge, running for cover only at the last minute.

The group largely escaped unscathed, although one woman in the group had "cut her knee quite badly", Mr Shimmin said in an Instagram post.

Mr Shimmin said nine Britons and one American were on a guided tour of the Tian Shan mountains when he heard the sound of "deep ice cracking".

He said he knows he "took a big risk" by staying to film the event, but felt safe as there was shelter nearby.

"I felt in control, but regardless, when the snow started coming over and it got dark/harder to breath, I was bricking it and thought I might die," he wrote.

Mr Shimmin said the group were five minutes from death.

"It was only later we realised just how lucky we’d been.

"If we had walked five minutes further on our trek, we would all be dead.

"If you look carefully in the video, you can see the faint grey trail winding through the grass. That was the path.

"We traversed it afterwards, walking among massive ice boulders and rocks that had been thrown much further than we could have run, even if we acted immediately.

"To make it worse, the path runs alongside a low ridge, hiding the mountain from view, so we would have only heard the roar before lights out."