Iceman curse claims another victim

The Scotsman has covered this story well.

HE'S FROZEN stiff and he's been dead for 5,300 years, but people are still wary of Oetzi the Iceman. Seven of those who have worked with the celebrated corpse, unearthed from a glacier on the Austrian-Italian Border in 1991, have now died, either through accident or illness, and our seemingly limitless credulity regarding revenge from beyond the grave has gone into overdrive yet again. Last month's news of the death of Dr Tom Loy, who had conducted DNA analysis of the deep-frozen cadaver, further fuelled rumours and headlines concerning a "curse", reminiscent of that associated with the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in the 1920s. Dr Loy, a Californian-born molecular biologist who undertook DNA investigation of the body, was found dead at his home in Brisbane, Australia, and an inquest proved inconclusive, although he was known to be suffering from a hereditary blood complaint, diagnosed shortly after he started work on Oetzi.

Not all agree that a curse is over the Iceman, a Bronze Age hunter. (For that matter, not all believe in the King Tut curse either.)

As one of Dickson's team observed last week, hundreds of people have been engaged in researching Oetzi: "I'm surprised, on statistical grounds alone, that more of them have not died in the last ten years."

For the record, if anything tragic happens to me anytime soon, blame the curse since I've written about it several times now so I have a loose connection to the Iceman. It'll make my death more interesting.