Vienna [Austria], January 12: Almost 60 years after a German man fell into a crevasse on a mountain glacier while ski touring in Austria, his remains have been found and identified.
The man from the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg died in an accident in 1967 at the age of 30 during a ski tour in the Ötztal Alps, located in western Austria's Tyrol region.
According to the Austrian police, a lower leg with a foot along with several other bones were discovered last August at around 2,500 metres above sea level near the town of Solden. The discovery site in a valley lies hundreds of metres below an Alpine glacier known as the Wasserfallferner.
The remains were analysed by a forensic institute in Innsbruck. Although some of the bones came from animals, the leg and foot were matched to the missing man using DNA.
Police said the man, who lived in the south-western German town of Schwabisch Gmünd, has no known living relatives. The skier fell into an ice crevasse on Easter Monday in 1967 while climbing toward the Seelenkogel mountain peak via the Wasserfallferner glacier, as the Austrian news agency APA reported at the time.
Another winter sports enthusiast raised the alarm and a major search operation was launched, but fog and snowfall made the rescue operation difficult. The rescuers eventually managed to discovered the spot of the accident, but found only an ice axe at the edge of the precipice. They managed to descend about 30 metres, but beyond that the crevasse became too narrow to go any further, and they were forced to abandon the search.
Source: Qatar Tribune
