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Uncertain about who had jurisdiction, Markus Pirpamer, owner of the shelter, called police on both sides of the border. The Italian carabinieri, believing the body was that of an ill-fated climber, showed no interest. Their Austrian counterparts, who had already pulled eight corpses out of glaciers that summer, said they would investigate by the next afternoon. Pirpamer decided the next morning to go see for himself, and was flabbergasted: "I had seen bodies come out of the glacier," he recalls, "but this was nothing like them. Bodies trapped in the glacier are white and waxy and usually chewed up by the ice. This one was brown and dried out. I could tell that it was really old."
Later that day, an Austrian policeman arrived by helicopter and attempted to free the body with a jackhammer. The brute-force tool chewed up the Iceman's garments and ripped through his left hip, exposing the bone. Fortunately, the officer ran out of compressed air to power the jackhammer before he could do further damage. His superiors decided to wait until the following week to resume the recovery; the helicopter, they explained, was needed for more important things.
Word of the find spread, and over the weekend about two dozen curiosity seekers trudged to the site. Some collected fragments of garments and tools as souvenirs, and one used a pickax to free the body from the melting ice. Overnight, however, the temperature dropped. By the time Innsbruck forensics expert Dr. Rainer Henn arrived to investigate the death, on Monday, Sept. 23, the body was again locked in ice. Having neglected to bring tools, Henn and his team resorted to hacking it out with a borrowed ice pickax and ski pole, largely destroying the archaeological value of the site.
The mistreated corpse, clothed from the waist down when discovered, was now stark naked except for remnants of a boot dangling from his right foot, and bore the marks of his crude recovery. He had also been castrated; it turned out that his penis and most of his scrotum were missing, perhaps accidentally broken off during his recovery and taken by a visitor. Flown out by helicopter and transferred to a hearse, the Iceman and his possessions were transported to Innsbruck. There, one final indignity awaited the body. It became the centerpiece of a press conference in the local morgue. While the Iceman and his tattered belongings lay on a dissecting table under blazing klieg lights, reporters and other hangers-on joked, smoked and even touched the body. Not until late afternoon did someone notice a fungus spreading on the Iceman's skin.
It was only then, after five days of heavy-handed mistreatment, that the Iceman was given professional succor. Arriving at the morgue, Konrad Spindler, head of Innsbruck's Institute for Prehistory, was stunned, immediately realizing the significance of the shriveled body. "I thought this was perhaps what my colleague Howard Carter experienced when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamen and gazed into the face of the Pharaoh."