The mystery of Dyatlov Pass has been solved after 61 years, as Russian prosecutors rule the skiers died of hypothermia after stripping off their clothes and fleeing in terror.
Led by 23-year-old Ifor Dyatlov, the experienced skiers failed to finish their 220mile-ski trek, sparking a huge manhunt.
Investigators later discovered their frozen bodies - many with missing body parts, others naked, and some with inexplicable injuries.
Decades-long rumours of natural disasters, yetis, and the supernatural have all been speculated as causing the deaths.
But now a new probe by the Russian prosecutor-general's office has concluded the group was killed by hypothermia - and that they had 'no chance' of survival.
What is known of that fateful night is that Ural Polytechnic students - seven men and two women, had made camp for the night at the foot of Kholat Syakhl, the Dead Mountain.
Now investigators say the nine fled in terror - and ran through the snow a mile or so down the mountain - from their tents in the deep nighttime cold, not having time to dress.
Their tent had been mysteriously slashed from the inside, their camp was deserted and they had left their clothes and belongings behind.
The empty tent baffled investigators, as it still contained items of clothing and pairs of shoes - implying that some of the students had ventured out into the wilderness barefoot and without coats.
Days after investigators found the tent the first two bodies were discovered.
Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko were found lying in the snow on flat land near a river, a mile from the tent, next to the remains of a long burnt-out fire.
The bodies were in a line 200 yards apart, as if they had been trying to crawl behind each other back up to the shelter of the tent, but never made it.
The final bodies were not found until the snow melted two months later in a ravine, with fractured skulls and chest injuries.
The tongue and eyes of Lyudmila Dubinina, 21, and Semen Zolotarev, 38, were missing.
They were discovered under 15ft of snow in a den they had desperately hollowed out for themselves before succumbing to the cold.
In 2019, Russian authorities made the surprise announcement that they planned to reopen the case in a bid to solve the case once and for all.
Now senior state prosecutor Andrei Kuryakov has revealed the group's tent had been in danger from an avalanche and that the party rushed from their camp to shield behind a ridge.
'This was a natural avalanche limiter. They did everything right'
But he claimed that when the group turned around, they had lost sight of their tent.
'Visibility was 16 metres. They lit a fire and then searched for their tent - but it had vanished in the whiteout after the avalanche.
He revealed the group 'froze to death in temperatures of between minus 40C and minus 45C'.
'It was an heroic fight. There was no panic, but they had no chance in these circumstances.'
Families of the nine cross-country skiers who died in a mysterious mountain tragedy in Russia in 1959 have rejected the official explanation that they froze to death - claiming that a Soviet rocket was involved.
The grisly Dyatlov Pass incident has sparked decades' worth of rumours about aliens, yetis and links to the KGB, after the bodies were found in the Ural Mountains with unexplained injuries including skull fractures and broken ribs.
Russia claimed on Saturday to have put the matter to bed after a new investigation found that the hikers had frozen to death following an avalanche which forced them from their tents in -45C conditions.
But a lawyer for the victims' relatives says they 'strongly disagree' with the official version and claims there is 'evidence that this was a man-made disaster'. Lawyer Yevgeny Chernousov suggested the hikers might have died after 'an explosion in near space, an accidental crash of a rocket, or the fall of the booster stage' of a rocket.
The group were 'covered by a poisonous cloud, a mixture of gases of rocket fuel, components and combustion products', he proposed.
'They were poisoned. It was impossible to breathe, so they panicked, half-blind, and fled down away from the focus of the incident.
He claimed: 'With no force left, while dying, the three surviving men tried to get back to the tent, where warm clothes, food and medicines remained.
'But they froze…in dynamic poses, gripped by total rigor mortis.
'We believe that they all died within six hours, and this happened at night. This is our version.'
Chernousov said the relatives 'will never agree with these conclusions', adding that they were ready to exhume the victims# bodies to establish the cause.
'This is only the beginning of the struggle,' he said.
'We will not back down. Believe me, if we did not have evidence, we would not behave like this.'
Oleg Arkhipov, an expert on the February 1959 incident, described the avalanche theory as 'extremely unsatisfactory'.
Fragments of the internal organs of those who died - kept by the Soviet authorities - had been hidden, he said.
If an avalanche had caused the massacre - which was not what Soviet investigators believed - the KGB would not have taken organ samples, he said.
Eduard Tumanov, a leading forensic expert, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that 'thermal burns' on several bodies were not likely to be caused by an avalanche. 'Or that indented fractures of the skull bones would form an even snow cover.'
-- Edited by Digger on Tuesday 14th of July 2020 08:27:55 PM
