Italian mountain rescue crews have recovered the remains of two – and possibly three – hikers who are thought to have gone missing in the 1980s or 1990s.
The corpses were on a glacier along Mont Blanc’s southern face, officials said today.
They were discovered earlier in the week by a hiker searching for artefacts from two Air India plane crashes – one from 1966 in which over 100 people died and another from 1950 in which nearly 50 perished.
‘We have many missing people in that area,’ Alpine rescue commander Delfino Viglione said, adding that another 20 or so hikers disappeared there over the decades.
Pictured: The area where corpses were spotted on Mont Blanc’s Southern face. They were found on Wednesday on the Miage glacier by an alpinist
Alpine rescue chief Delfino Viglione said another 20 hikers went missing along the Miage glacier on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. Pictured: Rescue workers on the site after being alerted to the discovery of the remains
‘We often have discoveries. We don’t go in search of them but they are pointed out to us by hikers and climbers.’
Viglione said a wallet belonging to a German man who went missing while supposedly on a trip to another part of Italy in the 1990s was found in a backpack near the remains.
Italian Guardia di Finanza and firefighters officers inspect the area where corpses were spotted on Mont Blanc’s southern face
A coroner was testing the remains to see if they are a match.
There was no immediate indication of who the other remains may belong to.
Glacier melting during the unusually hot summer in Europe helped reveal the remains, which were torn asunder over the years by natural glacier movements.
‘The glacier continues to expel the bodies,’ he said.
‘In general, the remains are transported toward the valley.
‘But if the glacier is melting, it increases the possibility of finding them.’
The discovery of more bodies on Mont Blanc – the highest mountain in the Alps, rising 15,781 feet above sea level – was just the latest of long-missing remains found this summer.
In August, police in southwestern Switzerland found the remains of a German hiker who went missing three decades ago in the Hohlaub glacier.
In July, Swiss police recovered the bodies of a local couple who left to feed their animals in 1942 but never returned.
Marcelin Dumoulin, a 40-year-old shoemaker at the time, and his wife Francine, a schoolteacher aged 37, had left their village of Chandolin to milk their cows in a meadow above Chandolin in the Valais canton on August 15, 1942.
Francine Dumoulin, 37, (left) and her husband Marcelin, 40. The couple went to milk their cows in 1942 but their corpses were only recovered last month
The bodies of a couple that disappeared 75 years ago were found lying in the Diablerets massif in southern Switzerland last month
Their remains were found preserved in a receding glacier, ending decades of uncertainty for their seven children.
The bodies were found lying near each other in the Diablerets massif in southern Switzerland, along with backpacks, a bottle, a book and a watch.
Also last month, body parts that could belong to passengers killed in one of the Air India crashes were found in the French Alps.
Daniel Roche, who has spent years combing the Bossons Glacier on Mont Blanc looking for remains, said he had found a hand and the upper part of a human leg.