VIENNA, Oct 18: The man who 13 years ago found the frozen remains of a prehistoric iceman in an Alpine glacier has disappeared in the snow-covered Alps with little hope of being found, Austrian rescue authorities said on Monday.

A member of the mountain rescue team at Bad Hofgastein in Austria told Reuters Helmut Simon, the German man who found the 5,300-year-old mummified body while hiking on the border of Austria and Italy in 1991 has been missing for three days.

"There's a lot of snow up there," the rescuer, who did not want to be named, said about the 2,467-metre Garmskarkogel mountain in the Salzburg region, where Simon vanished. "We've looked everywhere. He was hiking alone."

"We employed 93 men and search dogs in the search but we didn't find him," he said, adding that the team had suspended the rescue mission.

Simon, 67, and his wife, Erika, from Nuremberg in Germany found the neolithic iceman in Sept. 1991 on the 3,000-metrehigh Similaun glacier.

The rescuer said Simon probably did not have a tent with him and there were no signs he had been at any of the permanent huts on the mountain.-Reuters