Top Italian mountain climber Karl Unterkircher fell to his death Wednesday in a bid to open a new route to the top of Himalayan giant Nanga Parbat.
Unterkircher's two companions phoned his manager, Herbert Mussner, and said they could see his body at the bottom of a crevice, covered in snow.
The pair, Walter Nones and Simon Kehrer, are continuing the bid without their leader, Mussner told ANSA.
''There's no hope left,'' Mussner said.
Unterkircher, 38, is survived by his wife and three small children.
The accident took place about 7,000 metres up the 8,125m mountain, where rescue operations are impossible.
Nanga Parbat is the same peak where Guenther Messner, the younger brother of Italy's greatest living mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, fell to his death in 1970.
''Karl Unterkircher was the new star of mountain climbing,'' Messner said when told of his death.
''This is an incredible tragedy,'' said Messner, 64, the first man to scale Everest without oxygen and the first to climb all 14 of the world's peaks higher than 8,000m.
Unterkircher climbed Everest and K2 four years ago and recently devoted himself to finding new ways up the world's highest peaks.
Nanga Parbat, whose name in Urdu is 'Naked Mountain', is the world's ninth highest mountain.
It has been nicknamed the Killer Mountain because of the difficulties it poses.
