The place of death of albert I became the object of pilgrimage of many people.
Genetics from the Catholic University of Louvain has confirmed that the blood found at the scene of the death of the king of Belgium albert I, really belongs to the monarch. He died in 1934, fell from the cliff, but his death was the occasion for speculative theories due to the lack of witnesses. Article with results of a study published in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics.
The place of death of albert I became the object of pilgrimage for many people, the stones and leaves stained with the blood of the king were collected in the night from 17 to 18 February by the locals. Scientists have acquired the blood-stained tree leaves and compared extracted from the samples of DNA with the results of the analysis of the two surviving relatives of the monarch. They were Simeon II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the last Tsar of Bulgaria, and the German Baroness Anna Maria Haxthausen. The results showed that the blood indeed belongs to albert I.
The king of Belgium was engaged in mountaineering. 17 February 1934 he fell from a cliff during one of the climbs near Marche-Les-dames. However, other versions of the death of albert I, including political assassination, and that the monarch will never in his lifetime have not been in that place, and his body was returned later to stage an accident. According to scientists, their work refutes such assumptions, however the full investigation of the circumstances of death is impossible because of the limitations of incident, and also due to the “hunters for Souvenirs”, which unwittingly destroyed all the evidence.
