DOUBTS have emerged over the true fate of Dominick Arduin, a French explorer who disappeared last March while attempting to become the first woman to ski alone to the North Pole. Colleagues have exposed her as a fantasist and a new book suggests that she may have staged her death in order to start a new life.

France mourned the loss of a plucky adventurer in April after an intensive helicopter search failed to find any trace of Arduin, 43, who lost contact with her base two days after setting out across the ice cap from Cape Arktichesky in northern Siberia. Arduin, who had sophisticated communications equipment and food for 17 days, was thought most likely to have drowned while kayaking between ice-floes only 15 miles from her departure point.

After her disappearance, colleagues in France and Finland, where Arduin had lived for 15 years, were dismayed to learn that she had lied extensively about her past. She had, among other things, invented an Alpine childhood when she grew up in Paris, falsely claimed that her parents had been killed in a car accident in her childhood and hid the existence of a brother and sister.

Her reputation has taken a further knock with the publication of The Secrets of the Adventurer, by Sven Pahajoki, a Finnish journalist who was a friend and helped raise funds for the costly search for her. Pahajoki casts doubt on her fate, quoting an uncle as saying that she may have faked her disappearance in order to escape debts and start a new life, possibly in Russia. Arduin’s family were not available yesterday.

Close associates of Arduin, who had dual Finnish-French nationality, yesterday dismissed the theory as implausible but they confirmed that she had invented a false past. Some suspected that she had a death wish. In 2003, Arduin was rescued from a failed first attempt to trek to the pole. Most of her toes were amputated after succumbing to frostbite.

Henri Hirvenoja, who helped research the book, insisted that she might not have died. “There is a strong possibility that Dominick Arduin is still alive,” he said in Helsinki.

“There were no traces found after her. For over a year before she left for Russia she studied the language intensively. She also had some contact with people living there before she left.”

Pahajoki said that he wrote his book after discovering the numerous inconsistencies in Arduin’s past. “It was surreal. When we went to check her background, everything turned out to be wrong. I felt sad for Dominick. She was a person that lived in a kind of fairytale.” However, Pirjo Salonen, who acted as secretary for Arduin, said yesterday that the claims were “about as plausible as saying that Elvis is still alive”.

The book appeared to have been written purely to make money, she said. “I was with her in the week before she left and I can honestly say that she really wanted to make it to the pole,” she told The Times.

“If she had wanted to disappear, she would have packed things for that. Some things were not completely what she claimed but nothing important, more like white lies.”

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