A missing British explorer’s body may have been secretly moved by China, a person involved in the campaign to recover his body has claimed.
George Mallory, 37, and Andrew ‘Sandy' Irvine, 22, were part of the 1924 expedition to climb the world’s tallest mountain.
The pair were reported as missing during their ascent of the mountain.
A mystery surrounded their disappearance for more than 80 years.
Mallory’s body was discovered 2,000ft from the summit in 1999.
There was also renewed hope that Irvine’s body could have been located.
However, speculation has grown about whether his remains were removed and placed in another location.
There have even been fresh murmurings that China was involved in a cover up.
Mark Synnott, who was part of an expedition that searched for their remains told The Observer: “We had GPS co-ordinates for where the body was. We flew the drone to that spot.
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“We took photos. I feel if Mallory’s body was still there, we would have seen it. It doesn’t make any sense. Why remove the body?”
Jamie McGuinness, who has made it to the top of Everest five times from the Tibetan side and was also involved in the search, added: “Irvine's body is almost certainly no longer up there.
“We gave it a good search with drones, and we spotted several other bodies, so we know we weren't missing anything of the right size.”
It has even been suggested that Beijing moved the bodies of Mallory and Irvine in a bid to cover up potential evidence.
Jake Norton, who was separately part of a 2001 mission to locate Irvine and helped find Mallory in 1999, believes he was still there but argued the Chinese were “worried enough to do anything about it in the early 2000s”.
This changed ahead of Beijing hosting the 2008 Olympic Games.
McGuiness separately claimed an official the China Tibet Mountaineering Association (CTMA) said: “It was thrown off the mountain a lot earlier than that.”
The body was allegedly then taken off the mountain before taking it back to Lhasa, in Tibet.
It is claimed it has been kept under “lock and key” with other Mallory artefacts.
Synnott said: “We now have multiple sources all essentially saying the same thing: the Chinese found Irvine, removed the body, and are jealously guarding this information from the rest of the world – all to protect the claim that the 1960 Chinese team was the first to reach the summit.”
