ISLAMABAD, Sept 4: A DNA test on the remains of a climber found recently on Naga Parbat would decide conclusively whether he was the brother renowned Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner had lost on Nanga Parbat 35 years ago.

Reinhold Messner told a press conference here on Sunday that he was certain the remains were those of his brother Gunther Messner who had disappeared on June 29, 1970 while descending the ‘killer mountain’ in bad weather.

“It is absolutely clear — and there are no doubts — that the remains and a shoe found by three locals at an altitude of 4,300 metres are of Gunther,” said Messner who has the distinction of having scaled all the above 8,000-metre peaks in the world.

A German doctor, Dr Prof Hipp Roudolf, present at the press conference, told Dawn that the DNA test being carried out in Munich would clinch the issue within the next two weeks.

Gunther’s loss had aroused a controversy with two members of the 1970 expedition to Nanga Parbat and several other climbers accusing Reinhold Messner of having “sacrificed” his brother for his own ambitions.

Reinhold described Gunther’s disappearance in a reported avalanche, his frantic search for him and his own escape through the Diamer Valley as a defining experience in his book The Naked Mountain, which sparked a firestorm in Europe.

In books written as direct rebuttals to The Naked Mountain, two members of the expedition claimed that Messner’s story is a whitewash of the truth that he abandoned his brother on the peak.

“There is a big lie behind Reinhold’s story,” said Hans Saler, a 56-year-old mountain guide now based in Pucn, Chile.

In his June 2003 book Between Light and Shadow: The Messner Tragedy on Nanga Parbat, he claims Messner sacrificed Gunther for his own ambition, an allegation echoed in The Traverse: Gunther Messner’s Death on Nanga Parbat Expedition, Members Break Their Silence, by fellow team member Max von Kienlin, a 69-year-old baron who lives in Munich.

Both climbers said that Messner’s descent of the Diamer Face was not an emergency escape. They say though this was his first Himalayan expedition, he planned all along to traverse the entire mountain solo and score a first on an 8,000-metre peak.

Most astonishingly, both claim that Gunther never accompanied Reinhold down the face at all. Instead, von Kienlin and Saler maintain, Reinhold left his brother near the summit to find his own way down, and Gunther died descending the Rupal side, alone and unseen. Messner, they said, has been changing his story ever since to deflect his guilt.

Reinhold Messner, however, rejected these charges as baseless.

He vowed to return to Nanga Parbat to scour the base of the Diamer Face, locate Gunther’s remains, and prove his story once and for all.

The recovery of the remains by three locals last month is expected to bring this controversy to an end.