An Austrian court has found a 37-year-old amateur mountaineer guilty of manslaughter over his girlfriend’s death near Austria’s highest summit, after he left her to fetch help when she could not go on.

The case is unusual because while climbing accidents are common, prosecutions over them are rare.

The court in the western city of Innsbruck handed the Austrian man a five-month suspended prison sentence and a €9,400 ($11,100) fine for causing her death in January 2025 by gross negligence, an offence that carries a maximum prison sentence of three years.

The trial has raised questions about the extent of legal liability in the high mountains, an inherently dangerous environment that climbers generally explore at their own risk.

After a day’s climbing in which they fell far behind schedule, the 33-year-old woman was exhausted and unable to go on, after they reached about 50 metres below the summit of the Grossglockner mountain on a freezing winter’s night, the court heard.

The defendant, identified as Thomas P, left his girlfriend Kerstin G exposed to strong winds without wrapping her in her emergency blanket or bivouac bag for reasons he could not fully explain, to fetch help in a shelter on the mountain. The equipment stayed in her rucksack.

When asked why, he told the court the situation had been particularly stressful.

A short call to the mountain police did not trigger a search since the police said he did not make clear they needed rescuing, and he failed to answer calls back or WhatsApp messages asking if they needed help. The defendant said his phone had been in airplane mode to save battery.

Prosecutors called an ex-girlfriend of his as a witness, who testified that they too had climbed the Grossglockner together in 2023 and after an argument over the route he left her alone at night, crying as her headlamp ran out of battery.

The presiding judge, Norbert Hofer, himself an experienced mountaineer, ruled the defendant should have realised Kerstin G would not be able to complete the climb well before they ran into difficulty.

“I do not see you as a murderer. I do not see you as cold-hearted,” Hofer told Thomas P as he read his ruling, accepting that he had indeed gone to fetch help.

He added, however, that the defendant was a better mountaineer than his girlfriend by “galaxies”, and that she had placed herself in his care.

“What I want to say is that I am so terribly sorry,” the defendant, who pleaded not guilty, said earlier on Thursday.