Brussels, Oct 08: An Italian mountaineer has challenged a Japanese alpinist who claims he was the first person to reveal that the infamous Himalayan Abominable Snowman is in fact a brown bear.

Reinhold Messner, who is also a member of the European parliament, reacted after the claim last month by Japanese mountaineer Makoto Nebuka, 56, a senior member of the Japanese Alpine Club.
Messner said that "after years of research," he proved the legendary ape-like monster to be nothing more than a bear in his book "My Quest for the Yeti" published five years ago. "This discovery goes .. to (me)," he said. Nebuka announced his discovery last month, saying that the yeti is really the endangered Himalayan Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos).
His theory rests on a linguistic discovery: through a series of interviews with local people in Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, he has found that "yeti" is a regional dialect word for "meti", meaning bear.
Messner, 58, originally from the southern Tyrol region of northern Italy, has been a member of the Green group in the European Parliament since 1999.
Bureau Report