Source: The Times of India, New Delhi, Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Rod Nordland
"Yes I do," Inspector Horm said, recalling their conversation. "Well, I have the coldest case of all for you," said Anglika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, in Bolzano, Italy.
The victim, nicknamed Otzi, has been in cold storage in her museum for a quarter-century. Often called the Iceman, he is the world's most perfectly preserved mummy, a Copper Age fellow who had been frozen inside a glacier along the northern Italian border with Austria until two hikers discovered him in 1991.
The cause of death remained uncertain until 10 years later, when an X-ray of the mummy pointed to foul play in the form of a flint arrowhead embedded in his back, just under his shoulder.
The glacier not only froze Otzi where he had died, but the high humidity of the ice also kept his organs and skill largely intact. "Imagine, we know the stomach contents of a person 5,000 years ago," Inspector Horn said.
In his last two days, they found, he consumed three distinct meals and walked from an elevation of about 6,500 feet, down to the valley floor and then up into the mountains again, where he was found at the crime site, 10,500 feet up.
Inspector Horn surmises Otzi may have come down to his village and become embroiled in a violent altercation. Then he left, fully provisioned with food, the embers of a fire. At 10,500 feet, he made what appeared to be a camp. "Roughly half an hour before his death he was having a proper meal," Inspector Horn said.
Half an hour after Otzi dined, the killer came along and shot him in the back from a distance of almost 100 feet. The arrow went under his left armpit and ripped through a roughly half-inch section of his sub-clavian artery, a would that would have been quickly fatal and probably not treatable even in modern times.
There is one thing they are unlikely to discover, as Inspector Horn noted. "I'm not optimistic we'll find the offender in Otzi's case."
Rod Nordland
When the head of a small Italian museum called Detective Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police, she asked him if he investigated cold cases.
The victim, nicknamed Otzi, has been in cold storage in her museum for a quarter-century. Often called the Iceman, he is the world's most perfectly preserved mummy, a Copper Age fellow who had been frozen inside a glacier along the northern Italian border with Austria until two hikers discovered him in 1991.
The cause of death remained uncertain until 10 years later, when an X-ray of the mummy pointed to foul play in the form of a flint arrowhead embedded in his back, just under his shoulder.
The glacier not only froze Otzi where he had died, but the high humidity of the ice also kept his organs and skill largely intact. "Imagine, we know the stomach contents of a person 5,000 years ago," Inspector Horn said.
In his last two days, they found, he consumed three distinct meals and walked from an elevation of about 6,500 feet, down to the valley floor and then up into the mountains again, where he was found at the crime site, 10,500 feet up.
Inspector Horn surmises Otzi may have come down to his village and become embroiled in a violent altercation. Then he left, fully provisioned with food, the embers of a fire. At 10,500 feet, he made what appeared to be a camp. "Roughly half an hour before his death he was having a proper meal," Inspector Horn said.
Half an hour after Otzi dined, the killer came along and shot him in the back from a distance of almost 100 feet. The arrow went under his left armpit and ripped through a roughly half-inch section of his sub-clavian artery, a would that would have been quickly fatal and probably not treatable even in modern times.
There is one thing they are unlikely to discover, as Inspector Horn noted. "I'm not optimistic we'll find the offender in Otzi's case."