January 27, 2004 In the latest saga of Reinhold Messner's dramatic battle against allegations that he abandoned his brother, Günther, to die on their 1970 summit bid of Pakistan's 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, the renowned mountaineer claims to have unearthed a new piece of evidence that will prove his innocence. Messner, 59, has produced a fibula bone found on Nanga Parbat that he believes belonged to Günther, and submitted it for genetic testing at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Austria's Innsbruck University.
The South Tyrolean newspaper, Tageszeitung, reported on Sunday that according to anatomy pathologist Eduard Egarter, initial tests suggest that the fibula, found at the base of the mountain's Diamir Face, may indeed have been Günther's.
As Outside reported in November 2003, breaking the story in the United States (See "Buried in the Past," by Greg Child), Messner is currently involved in litigation over accusations by former climbing partners that he put his own ambition ahead of his brother's welfare, a choice that resulted in his brother's death.
Günther never made it off Nanga Parbat, and fellow expedition members Max-Engelhardt von Kienlin and Hans Saler claimed in books published last year that Messner sent his weakened brother down the mountain alone while pursuing his goal to be the first person to traverse Nanga Parbat, ascending via the 14,763-foot Rupal Face and descending via the never-attempted, and more treacherous, Diamir side. News of the bone finding comes just days before a Hamburg court is expected to rule on Messner's injunction against Von Kienlin's 2003 book, The Traverse: Günther Messner's Death on Nanga Parbat: Expedition Members Break Their Silence.
In a January 26 notice on his Web site, Messner writes that the genetic test confirms his version of the story, published in his 40th book, The Naked Mountain, in 2002. According to the book, Günther, who was suffering from altitude sickness, died in an avalanche as the pair attempted to descend the Diamir Face. After searching in vain for his brother, Messner eventually gave up in despair, and descended alone. The bone was reportedly found at the foot of the Face, just a few hundred meters below the point where Günther was supposedly swept away.
European newspapers report that climber Hanspeter Eisendle spotted the bone during his and Messner's 2000 expedition to Nanga Parbat, in which they had attempted a new route on the Diamir Face, but were forced back because of bad weather. Messner told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that he had previously thought the bone belonged to a Pakistani climber (and had subsequently displayed it in his Messner Mountain Museum), but on discovering last autumn that that climber's body had been found, he decided to have it examined by forensic scientists.
Messner has said that although initial testing doesn't prove conclusively that the bone is his brother's, he is certain that a second test, whose results are expected in two months, will confirm the results. "I have proven with this that everything else was a smear campaign— it happened the way I told it," he told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
