An Italian mountaineer has retrieved his brother's remains from Pakistan's Nanga Parbat mountain 35 years after their conquest of the peak ended in tragedy.
Fellow members of the 1970 expedition had accused Reinhold Messner of having abandoned his
Reinhold Messner
younger brother, Gunther, then 24, after reaching the summit of the world's ninth highest peak, when Gunther was suffering altitude sickness.
The climb was a turning point in the career of Mr Messner, and the Italian went on to make a solo ascent of Mount Everest. He also became the first man to scale the world's 14 tallest peaks without using bottled oxygen.
"On Nanga Parbat I suffered my biggest tragedy, losing my brother," Mr Messner (61) said on Sunday at a news conference, after a trek around the mountain.
Mr Messner, who has also been a member of the European Parliament, showed reporters a leather mountaineer's shoe, with holes in the front but largely intact, that he said belonged to his brother.
He said villagers found it July 17th near the base of the 26,658-foot-high peak, along with human remains apparently churned down its steep slopes over the years by glaciers and snows.
"Today nobody (is) using leather shoes. Only in this expedition we used this shoe," Mr Messner said. He said the remains were cremated "in a beautiful spot" near Nanga Parbat's base and the ashes will be scattered over the Himalayas.
Mr Messner has sued two members of the 1970 Nanga Parbat expedition for alleging in books that he had sacrificed his brother's life so he could reach the summit.
They alleged Mr Messner sent Gunther down a more dangerous route, although the two brothers had both nearly died on the way up it, while Mr Messner took a safer route for his descent.
AP