Five missing ski tourers found dead in the Swiss Alps

As of: March 11, 2024 11:24 a.m

Rescue workers have found the bodies of five ski tourers in the Swiss Alps. We are still looking for another athlete. The group had been traveling in the Tête Blanche area at the weekend.

The group had been missing since Saturday, and now five of six ski tourers have been found dead in the Swiss Alps. The police confirmed this. Bad weather conditions made the search more difficult, but a team of rescue workers finally discovered the five bodies, said the Valais cantonal police. The sixth missing person is still being sought.

The group of skiers aged 21 to 58 left Zermatt on Saturday morning to reach the town of Arolla during the day. Since then, they have been missing in the area around the approximately 3,700 meter high Tête Blanche mountain, which lies halfway along the Zermatt-Arolla route. The group was reported missing by another family member who had been waiting for the ski tourers in Arolla.

According to information from the newspaper “Le Nouvelliste”, all of the dead belong to a family from the Swiss canton of Valais. It is said to be three brothers, her uncle and her cousin. The victims did “everything they could to survive,” said a police spokesman. But the temperatures were extremely low. It is unclear how experienced the tourers were and what equipment they had with them.

Stormy weather made the search difficult

It was said that everything had been tried to find the missing people alive. According to the police, a total of eight helicopters and dozens of mountain rescuers were deployed. “The cooperation between the individual organizations worked well,” said the police spokesman. The authorities’ cyber and IT specialists evaluated the data from the missing people’s cell phones. “These analyzes made it possible to confirm the mountaineers’ likely whereabouts in the mountain,” the police said.

The cause of death of the five tourers who have now been found is not yet clear. For now it remains unclear whether an avalanche led to the death of the five people or whether they froze to death. The public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into the exact circumstances of the events, said Attorney General Béatrice Pilloud.

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