Photo taken on Aug. 17, 2013 shows mountain climbers are seen at the glacier field near Mont-Blanc of the Alps. Mont-Blanc with the altitude of 4,810 meters is the highest peak in Europe. (Xinhua/Wang Xiaojun)
GENEVA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Seventy-five years after a Swiss couple disappeared near a ski resort in the Alps their frozen and mummified bodies have been found, Swiss newspaper Le Matin reported Tuesday.
The frozen corpses of Marceline and Francine Dumoulin were found lying near each other in the receding Tsanfleuron glacier not far from the famed Gstaad resort.
Swiss police said a DNA search would be carried out to definitively establish their identities, but the newspaper quoted 79-year-old Marceline Udry-Dumoulin as saying she believed the remains were of her parents, who went missing on Aug. 15, 1942.
The black, almost charred-looking remains were found by an employee of the ski station on July 13 engaged in what he believed was a routine inspection tour at an altitude of 2,600 meters.
"From afar, it looked like small rocks, but there were too many in the same place," explained Bernhard Tschannen who runs the nearby Glacier 3000, to Swiss public radio RTS.
"It was a man and a woman wearing clothes from the last (world) war", Tschannen was quoted as saying. "The ice preserved them perfectly and their belongings were intact."
Tschannen told Le Matin that the couple had probably fallen into a crevasse.
Udry-Dumoulin said, "We spent our whole lives looking for them, without stopping. We thought that we could give them the funeral they deserved one day."
Her father, a shoemaker, and mother, a teacher, went to milk their cows in a meadow above Chandolin in Canton Valais in 1942, but never came back.
Until now, "I can say that after 75 years of waiting this news gives me a deep sense of calm," Udry-Dumoulin said.
