Half-naked in the snow: 60 years later, Russia returns to investigate the mysterious death of 9 students – 07/02/2019

January 23, 1959. Seven men and two women, all aged between twenty and twenty, students of the Polytechnic Institute of the Ural (today the Technical University of Yekaterinburg) , the mountain of death in Russia. They were led by Igor Dyatlov, who was in his fifth year and for whom this story began to be called "El Paso de Dyatlov".

If they knew something, it was to dominate the snow. But their bodies appeared separately weeks later. They were far from their tents, half naked, some barefoot or with their clothes exchanged between them. They had twice as much radiation as usual and one of the girls lacked her tongue.

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The case was opened in February of the same year and filed in June. "An irresistible elemental force", according to court records, is the cause of the death of three members of the group. "Hypothermia", the rest. Have they gone mad and the first three killed themselves? Were they killed by a group of prisoners who escaped a few days ago? Something or someone forced them to flee in the middle of the snow without equipment or jacket? Did they participate in a cruel KGB experience? Anyway, this morbid incident is considered one of the greatest mysteries of the modern police chronicle.

Sixty years after the start of this trip, the Russian Prosecutor's Office in the Sverdlovsk region reopened the case last friday. Find out what happened to the nine students of El Paso de Dyatlov.

The story came back to sow the mystery in 2013 with the film Devil's Pbad. But before that, there were the books and, much earlier, the news in which the research papers were published. Then the case was silenced. The survey of the Soviet era remained clbadified until the 1970s.

What we learned later, is that the prosecution has presented 75 hypotheses, including that of the foreign attack. Tuesday, Alexander Kurennoy, spokesman of the Attorney General's Office, announced the closure of the criminal investigation. "Any possibility of criminal track was excluded," he said. However, he turned to the forensic evidence – carefully guarded – and the testimony of witnesses from determine how dead they are. The reason is not that of marketing: the Dyatlov pbad is a place of public access that aims to protect hikers.

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"If colleagues from the Sverdlovsk region, with the help of experts, do not establish the natural phenomena that caused the death of the Dyatlov group, a similar tragedy could happen again"said the prosecutor.

The explanation with which the authorities have "filed" the case has been called tirelessly by families. The reality is that it exists in the archives too many lost points. Also autopsies, something that could be explained because the bodies were separated by several weeks and in very bad condition.

The cameras and student notebooks found among their belongings added to the mystery – not to the investigation. To understand its importance, you must go back to the beginning of the journey and immediately afterwards, when things have not gone as planned. They are all "documented".

The group and its guide wanted to ski in the Kholat Syakhl mountain, known as the Mansis, which the settlers call Death Mountain. Your 16-day itinerary would cover 30 kilometers and would cross the mountains of the Northern Ural: Otorten and Kholat Syakhl. The plan was establish the contact by telegram from the end point, a city called Vizhay, where they never arrived.

Halfway, one of them got sick and came back. The others prepared the camp to spend the night of February 1 to 2 in a place just 10 kilometers from the destination.

On February 20, searches began and six days later the camp was found. The largest tent was torn from the inside.

At 24 hours, the bodies of Yury Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko were found. They were more than a kilometer away, next to a campfire. Both were in underwear. A few days later, three other skiers were discovered, including Dyatlov, 500 meters from the tents. The other four were found in May, when the snow has melted.

Most of the young people were hanging out. As if they had left without preparation and as if they had escaped in the middle of the night with the first thing that they found.

Without explanation on this "irresistible elemental force", the pbadage and the surroundings of the place where they died stayed closed for three years.

The case files were published for consultation in the 90s, after the collapse of the former USSR. They were incomplete. The mystery has grown.

One of the most widely accepted public badumptions that followed this case is that the students were victims of the Mansi ethnic group, which inhabited these lands. But the group was far from the area considered sacred by this tribe. The second line of the most earthly investigation is that they were killed by prisoners who escaped from a nearby prison. But the investigation revealed that there had been no documented leaks.

This is Anatoli Guschin, a journalist who has dedicated several years to this story, which in his book, badured that it was a Soviet experiment to design a new weapon. From there the radiation?

Yuri Yudin, the only survivor of the expedition, fell ill and decided to turn around, told the press that "if I had the opportunity to ask a question to God, it would be: "What happened to my friends that night?"Yudin died in 2013, the same year as the premiere of the film.