Frozen stiff Oetzi returns to an Alpine cold war

OETZI is home. Six years after his kidnapping, the world's oldest Italian traversed the Brenner Pass on Friday morning, strapped to a stretcher in the bowels of a freezer truck. Seven Austrian police vans escorted him out of the country, a helicopter kept terrorists at bay. The final lap of the journey from Tyrol to South Tyrol was guarded by the Carabinieri.

No passport checks barred the column's progress, because frontier controls in this part of Schengen Europe have been abolished. But, if the Ice Man's recent history is anything to go by, a border between Austria and Italy still exists, for ever sustaining enmity and prejudice that would not have been out of place in the days Oetzi roamed the Oetztaler Alps some 5,300 years ago.

Discovered in September 1991 by German ramblers, the mummified corpse was instantly claimed as its own by the German-speaking world. An Austrian coroner from Innsbruck, the capital of Tyrol province, was sent up the mountain 10,000ft above sea level. While he worked meticulously on the death certificate, scientists were prevented from making a proper examination. By the time the experts could take a good look, souvenir hunters had already helped themselves to a few bits, and the thawing corpse was sprouting mould.

Oetzi was dispatched to the freezer in the cellar of Innsbruck University that was to have been his final resting place. The past six years, however, have been anything but tranquil. Almost from the outset, Italian nationalists took it into their heads that the corpse had been found on their side of the border.

"Nonsense," replied the Austrians. Another group of experts set off with measuring tape. Their conclusion: the spot where the glacier yielded up the body was indeed Italian territory, exactly 92.57 metres inside South Tyrol.

Every Austrian believes, of course, that South Tyrol - Alto Adige to Italians - was unjustly taken away from Austria in 1919. Since Oetzi had been born long before the First World War, argued Tyrolean nationalists in both countries, there was no doubt about his Austrian credentials.

And lo, the scientists did indeed locate a prehistoric border, but not of the kind that Austrians had hoped to find. Oetzi's copper axe, one of the finest specimens of the age, was too good to have been made in the north, and had definitely come from a southern valley, they established. Even 5,300 years ago, it turns out, the Brenner Pass formed the boundary between southern sophistication and northern barbarity. Remains of his last supper - meat and coarse-ground wheat - proved conclusively that he was a southerner.

Austria gave in, but even now repatriation has taken place, nationalistic jibes will not stop. For six years, Oetzi was held in Innsbruck for study. The research has been extremely fruitful, shedding light on neolithic culture and founding a new branch of forensic archaeology.

We now know that Oetzi died at the then ripe old age of 45. He probably fell asleep and froze to death, though analysis of his organs revealed surprisingly modern diseases. Oetzi had suffered from sclerotic arteries - the result of a cholesterol-rich diet - as well as copper and arsenic poisoning. This was probably associated with copper smelting. The scientists have restored his grass cape as well as some of the clothes he wore, and analysed the repair kit and tools he had carried.

Now, Austrians fear, science will give way to "sensationalism". In Bolzano, the administrative centre of Italy's most Germanic province, a museum was built for Oetzi at huge cost. He will be kept in a special freezer, re-creating the temperature and humidity of his glacial home. "The freezer is unsafe," claim the Austrians. "There is a back-up, with its own power supply," retort the Italians.

The freezer also has a window, and visitors will be able to look at Oetzi from 28 March. Innsbruck's Professor Konrad Spindler, who kept the corpse out of public view, is outraged. The decision to exhibit the mummy is "ethically and morally intolerable", he declared. The Bolzano museum should care - it expects 300,000 visitors in the first year.