Scientists solve an old whodunit

PARIS - Agence France-Presse

An assassin slit the throat of Egypt’s last great pharaoh at the climax of a bitter succession battle, scientists said Dec. 27 in a report on a 3,000-year-old royal murder.

Forensic technology suggests Ramses III, a king revered as a god, met his death at the hand of a killer, or killers, sent by his conniving wife and ambitious son, they said.

Computed tomography (CT) imaging of the mummy of Ramses III shows that the pharaoh’s windpipe and major arteries were slashed, inflicting a wound 70 millimeters wide and reaching almost to the spine, the investigators said.

The cut severed all the soft tissue on the front of the neck.

 “I have almost no doubt about the fact that Ramses III was killed by this cut in his throat,” palaeopathologist Albert Zink of the EURAC Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Italy told AFP.