[meteorite-list] Three-Ton Meteorite Stolen in Russia

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.france24.com/france24Public/en/administration/afp-news.html?id=070810151250.o4s1dvds&cat=null 

Three-tonne meteorite stolen in Russia
AFP News brief
August 10, 2007

Russian police were combing the northern Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk on 
Friday for a three-tonne meteorite that has disappeared from under the 
nose of its keepers.

The giant rock was stolen from the yard of the Tunguska Space Event 
foundation, whose director said it was the part of meteor that caused a 
massive explosion in Siberia in 1908, news agency Interfax reported.

"It winds up that it disappeared back in June, when the foundation was 
moving out of its old building," a police spokesman told the agency.

"Our colleagues are establishing what got lost, where the rock is and 
why they only came to us about it now," he said.

Foundation director Yury Lavbin brought the three-tonne rock to 
Krasnoyarsk after an 2004 expedition to the site of the so-called 
"Tunguska event" -- a mysterious mid-air explosion in Siberia in 1908 
that was 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on 
Hiroshima in 1945.

Lavbin claimed at the time to have discovered the wreckage of an 
alien spacecraft during the expedition.

Scientists continue to argue over the cause of the explosion, which 
flattened over 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles) of Siberian
forest.