The man who 13 years ago found the frozen remains of a prehistoric iceman in an Alpine glacier has disappeared in the Alps with little hope of being found.
A member of the mountain rescue team at Bad Hofgastein in Austria said Mr Helmut Simon, the German man who found the 5,300-year-old mummified body while hiking on the border of Austria and Italy in 1991, has been missing for three days.
The rescuer said there was a lot of snow on the 2,467-metre Garmskarkogel mountain in the Salzburg region, where Mr Simon vanished while hiking alone.
"We employed 93 men and search dogs in the search but we didn't find him," he said, adding that the team had suspended the rescue mission.
The rescuer said Simon probably did not have a tent with him and there were no signs he had been at any of the permanent huts on the mountain. "You can imagine that the chances of survival outside in the snow are quite slim."
Mr Simon (67) and his wife, from Nuremberg in Germany, found the neolithic iceman in September 1991 on the 3,000-metrehigh Similaun glacier in the Tyrolean Oetz Valley. The mummy was named "Oetzi" after the valley.