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Melting Alpine Ice Unveils Decades-Old Corpses
« on: Aug 29th, 2003, 1:56pm » |
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Melting Alpine Ice Unveils Decades-Old Corpses
ZURICH (Reuters) - A Swiss father who searched for his mountaineer son's missing body for 18 years thought his quest had paid off this week when a glacier, thawing in Europe's record heat, gave up a corpse.
The young son and a companion vanished in 1985 while scaling the Titlis peak in the central Swiss Alps. Officials concluded strong winds blew them off the mountainside as they bivouacked.
The man's father, who police have not named, made dozens of trips to the area to seek his remains over the years, finding nothing but bits of equipment.
But police said Thursday he had discovered a corpse the day before that had been uncovered by a receding ice pack.
"Yesterday (the father) thought it was his son. Today he says it is the friend," a police spokesman said. "I would leave this wide open for the moment ... We don't know if it is the body of his son, his son's companion or someone else."
Several other people have gone missing in the area over the years. The decomposed body was given to forensics experts for tests.
Thawing Alpine ice has yielded several bodies this summer.
German hiker Helmut Weiss, last seen in 1971, was found this week at an altitude of 8,860 feet near Ischgl in Austria, German police said Thursday.
A group of German hikers came upon his decomposed upper body Tuesday, protruding 32 inches from the ice. He was identified by items in his wallet.
Austrian Police said the bodies of an Austrian and Canadian had been also found in the mountainous Tyrol province alone.
In July, hikers discovered the body of a German woman missing since 1956 near Kaprun in another part of Austria.
"Maybe we will even find a new Oetzi," a German police spokesman said, referring to a mummified 5,000-year-old corpse whose discovery in Alpine ice in 1991 caused a sensation.
Hikers who found "Oetzi" first mistook him for an unlucky mountaineer.
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