The body of a father who disappeared 28 years ago during a trip through remote Pakistan to escape a volatile family feud was found perfectly intact inside a glacier last Friday.
The man’s name was Naseeruddin, according to an undamaged identification card found on the corpse after it was excavated out of the glacier, BBC Urdu reported.
“What I saw was unbelievable. The body was intact. The clothes were not even torn,” Omar Khan, a local shepherd who found the remains, told the outlet.
Police were miraculously able to use the simple ID to link the body back to a married father of two who disappeared in the mountainous Kohistan region in June 1997.
Authorities presumed Naseeruddin must have slid through a crack and fallen into the iceberg while taking shelter in a cave during a thick snowstorm.
The Kohistan region, located in a remote part of northern Pakistan closer to the Afghanistan border, used to see more consistent snowfall, but rising temperatures spurred glacial melt — exposing long-hidden remains and making way for Naseeruddin’s cold case to finally be solved.
At the time of his disappearance, Naseeruddin was traveling with his brother Kaseeruddin on horseback through the region after an increasingly violent feud with their family forced them to leave home and live in hiding, The Express Tribune reported.
The duo had only just arrived in the valley the day Naseeruddin went missing. He ducked into a cave sometime in the afternoon to try and evade attackers, but never came back out, Kaseeruddin told the outlet.
The dutiful brother rushed to get help and scoured the area for Naseeruddin, but never found him.
Now, Kaseeruddin is returning to the valley to collect his brother’s remains. He will either bury Naseeruddin out in the mountains or return him to their ancestral home, the outlet reported.
The lack of oxygen inside the glacier, combined with the extreme cold and low humidity, created the perfect conditions to practically mummify Naseeruddin’s body and protect it from the elements.
