(Original headline: Ice mummy's curse returns )
Fears of a curse waged by Italy's ice mummy have returned with the death of the seventh person who came into contact with the Stone Age hunter .
Tom Loy, the world's leading molecular archaeologist, was found dead in his Brisbane home while he was working on the final stages of a book on the Iceman .
Colleagues at Queensland university said Loy "did not believe in superstition" and had been suffering from a blood infection .
But his death re-ignited speculation that Oetzi had again struck down a person who dared to disturb his 5,000-year sleep .
"Tom was completing his work on the mummy's DNA, which he was about to put in his book," said fellow archaeologist Gail Robertson.
"He was putting the finishing touches to our argument that Oetzi didn't die alone," Robertson said .
Loy challenged the conventional wisdom on the Iceman two years ago by unveiling DNA tests on blood found on Oetzi's axe .
He said the DNA belonged to several ancient warriors .
Previously, the Iceman was believed to have died after being shot by an arrow fired by a rival hunter .
But Loy's work convinced him that Oetzi died in fierce combat after been set upon by other warriors .
The researcher may now have become the latest victim of the Iceman's axe, some say .
With the body count now standing at seven, many are likening Oetzi to the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, the first mummy said to have cursed the team that profaned his tomb .
The first death was that of forensic expert Rainer Henn, who placed the remains in a body bag with his bare hands after it turned up in a northern Italian glacier in the Oetz Valley in 1991 .
Two years later Henn died in a car crash on his way to a conference on the Iceman .
Next came Alpine guide Kurt Fritz, who arranged helicopter transportation for Oetzi. He was killed by a snowslide, the only one in his climbing party to die .
Shortly afterwards, a brain tumour killed Rainer Holtz, the Austrian journalist who filmed the recovery of the Iceman .
The fourth death was that of Helmut Simon, the German tourist who spotted Oetzi peeping out of the ice .
Simon failed to return from a mountain hike a year ago. His body was found eight days later, frozen under a sheet of ice and snow .
A few hours after attending Simon's funeral, the head of the rescue team that found his body, Dieter Warnecke, died of a heart attack .
Then last April Konrad Spindler, head of Innsbruck University's Iceman studies lab, died from complications arising from multiple sclerosis .
Spindler, like Loy, was a sick man. But that hasn't stopped believers in the mummy's curse from trying to raise a fresh chill from the Iceman's refrigerated cell in his museum in northern Italy .
