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euro ticking machine 12-May-2004 At 11:02:28 AM Damietta

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Same story, different source

From:
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9539034%255E1702,00.html

Swiss climbing champion killed
From correspondents in Geneva
May 11, 2004
A SWISS passport found with two men who were beaten to death in an Afghan park belonged to a former world-class competitive climber, police said today.

The passport was in the name of Geneva native Elie Chevieux, 30, cantonal (state) police spokesman Christophe Zawadzki said, confirming reports in local media.

Switzerland's Foreign Ministry said no formal identifications had been made, though both men were believed to be from the Alpine nation.

Mr Chevieux's father, Georges, said his son had left in October on a photography trip that had already taken him to Russia, Japan, India and Nepal.

"He must have died for taking a photo too many," Mr Chevieux told the Lausanne daily Le Matin.

Georges Chevieux said he received an e-mail from his son last Thursday.

"He told me that he was coming home to go to a friend's wedding in Serbia. So when the media said there was a Swiss stoned to death, I didn't think of him."

Mr Chevieux said police contacted him yesterday to tell him that they believed one of the bodies was that of his son.

He said he did not know his son's travelling companion.

His son was second in the world competitive climbing championships in 1995 and S
Swiss champion in 1996 and 1997. Competitive climbing takes place on climbing walls.

The bodies of the two men were found in a Kabul park on Sunday. Police said the men, who were wearing baggy Afghan dress and woolen hats, had been beaten over the head with stones or bricks. An Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman said they had also been stabbed and that one also showed signs of strangulation.

Rudi Hager, the head of the Swiss development agency in Kabul which doubles as a diplomatic mission, said the men had registered as tourists at the Swiss embassy in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and crossed into Afghanistan at the end of April.