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Austrian police raid Kazakh biathlon team’s hotel rooms

Austrian police raided the hotel rooms of Kazakhstan’s national biathlon team late on Wednesday, seizing medical equipment, drugs and cellphones ahead of a world championships competition in Hochfilzen.

Published: 10 February 2017 12:00 CET
Austrian police raid Kazakh biathlon team's hotel rooms
The Hochfilzen Biathlon Center. Photo: Schaadfoto/Tyrol.com

Thirty police officers participated in the raid, Austrian authorities. They are now investigating doping violations and possible sports fraud under Austria’s criminal code.

“The police will do everything they can to clarify the issue of criminal liability,” Austria’s Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said in a statement on Thursday.

Police were tipped off after a witness saw several small buses pull up at a petrol station last month in East Tyrol, and dump a large cardboard box containing syringes and other medical equipment, as well as handwritten records detailing doping plans.

The police were able to link the materials to Kazakhstan’s biathlon team, with help from Austria’s national anti-doping agency and the Department of Betting Fraud, Doping and Medical-Related Crime.

The Kazakh athletes were drug tested after the raid, providing urine and blood samples, biathlon officials said. However, they were cleared to compete in the opening event of the world championships, a mixed relay, on Thursday.

CLIMATE CRISIS

Austria ‘likely to be ice-free within 45 years’

Austria is set to become largely "ice-free" within 45 years, the country's Alpine Club warned Friday, as two of its glaciers last year melted by more than 100 metres.

Published: 6 April 2024 12:17 CEST
Austria 'likely to be ice-free within 45 years'

Amid growing concerns over the effects of extreme warming on glaciers around the world, the latest report by the Austrian Alpine Club (OeAV) showed that rapid glacial retreat over the past seven years had accelerated.

The study found that 93 Austrian glaciers observed by the organisation retreated by 23.9 metres (78.4 feet) on average last year, marking the third-biggest glacier melt since measurements began in 1891.

Two of the glaciers showed especially drastic declines, with the Pasterze shrinking by 203.5 metres and the Rettenbachferner by 127 metres.

The 2023 readings came after the worst year on record for glacier melt in Austria, with glaciers shrinking by 28.7 metres (94.2 feet) on average in 2022.

Faced with extreme warming in the Alps, glacial ice in Austria could largely disappear within 45 years, the Alpine Club warned, adding that restrictive climate protection measures were introduced too late.

“In 40 to 45 years, all of Austria will be pretty much ice-free,” Andreas Kellerer-Pirklbauer, head of the Alpine Club’s glacier measurement service, told reporters on Friday.

The OeAV urged increased protection of glaciers as part of overall efforts to sustain biodiversity, noting that expansions of ski resorts had put Alpine regions “under constant pressure”.

According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), major glaciers worldwide suffered the largest loss of ice since records began in 1950, “driven by extreme melt in both western North America and Europe”.

In Switzerland, where the WMO is based, Alpine glaciers have lost 10 percent of their volume in the past two years alone.

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