The German man who discovered the frozen corpse of a prehistoric hunter in the Alps 13 years ago is thought to have suffered a similar fate to his famous find after he disappeared in the same mountain range at the weekend.
Helmut Simon, 67, failed to return from a climb on the 2100-metre Gamskarkogel in the Austrian Alps on Friday evening.
The retired caretaker stumbled across Otzi the iceman during a mountain hike in the Tyrolean Otz Valley with his wife, Erika, in September 1991.
Their discovery of the 5300-year-old mummified hunter was hailed as one of the most extraordinary Neolithic finds ever. Otzi, the world's oldest iceman, now attracts about 300,000 visitors a year to the museum that houses him in Bolzano, Italy.
German and Austrian newspapers were speculating whether Mr Simon had fallen foul of the "Otzi curse", suggesting that his likely death was punishment for having disturbed the resting place where the iceman had lain in a deep, frozen slumber for thousands of years.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/19/1097951699472.html?oneclick=true
RSS Feed For This Forum