'The coldest case': Detectives say 5,300-year-old Ötzi prepared a hefty meal of cooked meat before being brutally MURDERED

Detectives have discovered a murder victim ate a hefty meal of meat just half an hour before he died - even though he was struck down in 3,300 BC.

A police detective revealed that Ötzi, who is the world's best preserved natural mummy, had cooked a meal before he was killed in a surprise ambush in northern Italy.

They also found that he had a 'defensive' wound on his right hand - which detectives believe happened a few days before suggesting he was part of an ongoing feud.

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Researchers determined Ötzi died around the age of 45, was about 1.60 metres (five foot, three inches) tall and weighed 50 kilos (110 pounds). 

'It's by far the coldest case that I've been working on,' Det. Insp. Alexander Horn of the Munich Police in Germany told CTV News Channel from Munich on Monday. 

'I've worked on cases that were 30 or 40 years old but 5,300 years… that was a long time ago', he said.  

Detectives found evidence of cooked meat which suggests he prepared a proper meal for himself before he was struck down, writes CTV News. 

This suggests that contrary to what experts previously thought, Ötzi was not on the run when he was killed. 

'If you're in permanent danger, would you sit down and eat for a couple of minutes and take your time to do that if you're running away from somebody?' Inspector Horn said. 

He suffered a violent death, with an arrow severing a major blood vessel between the rib cage and the left shoulder blade, as well as a laceration on the hand.

'For us, it's more likely that this was a follow up actually, that somebody followed him and then killed him and his choice was to kill him from a distance with an arrow'. 

Mummified in ice, Otzi was discovered by two German hikers in the Oetztal Alps, 3,210 metres (10,500 feet) above sea level. 

'The interesting thing for us in researching Ötzi is that it's an ongoing research project. It has been for the last 25 years and will continue to be', said Inspector Horn.

Earlier this year, German mummy expert Albert Zink said at a talk in Vienna that his team also found that Ötzi had an ulcer-inducing bacteria and may have suffered from stomach aches.

But for all his parasites, worn ligaments and bad teeth, he was in 'pretty good shape', Zink wrote in the renowned US magazine Science in January. 

Ötzi wore clothes made of sheep, goat and cow skin and the 61 tattoos on his body were created with a mixture of charcoal and herbs.

'Of course, we don't know what language he spoke 5,000 years ago,' one of the researchers, Francesco Avanzini, told CNN earlier this year when the team announced their new project.

'But we should be able to recreate the timbre of his vowel sounds and, I hope, even create simulation of consonants.'

To hear Ötzi's voice, the team used physical information about his throat and combined it with data on the acoustic energy it would generate.

And voiced synthesizers were used to replicate it.

CT scans let the researchers digitally move Ötzi's arm, skull and reconstruct the vertebrae and bone that supports the tongue - without causing any damages to the fragile corpse.

'We had to deal with Ötzi's position, whose arm is covering his throat,' Francesco Avanzini, ENT specialist and phoniatrician at the city's General Hospital told Discovery News.

'For our project this is the worst position you can imagine. Moreover, the hyoid bone, or tongue-bone, was party absorbed and dislocated.'

Although CT scans allowed them to create parts of Ötzi's body, the team had to rely on mathematical models and software that simulate how vocal tracts work in order to get an idea about the density and tension of the vocal cords and the thickness and composition of the throat tissue, said Piero Cosi, a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences e Technology, National Research Council in Padova.