Museum of Lost Objects: The Genie of Nimrud

The BBC has an article by Kanishk Tharoor and Maryam Maruf about The Genie of Nimrud :

Three thousand years ago, a genie graced the walls of an Assyrian palace. Then, probably about twenty years ago, it disappeared, only to re-emerge in London, England. Since 2002 it's been languishing in police vaults at Scotland Yard because of difficulties determining the legal owner.
The genie is a powerfully built man, with wings sprouting from his back. About two meters high, it is carved in relief on a stone panel, holding a pine cone, and facing a pattern that represents the tree of life (photo). The genie symbolized both protection and fertility; its role was to safeguard and replenish the ancient kingdom of Assyria.
It was a design particularly popular with the Assyrian king, Ashurnasirpal II, who came to the throne in 883 BC, and made Nimrud his new capital.
"Ashurnasirpal and his artists were really the first to decorate many of the rooms in the public spaces within the palace," says archaeologist Augusta McMahon, lecturer at the University of Cambridge. "One of the key symbols that appeared over and over was this genie or protective spirit. Because, in the minds of the ancient Assyrians, it's an enormously powerful motif, it can't hurt to have a further fertility symbol somewhere in the room."
Protective genies came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The genie in the photograph is very similar but not identical to the one now in the hands of British police. Others had the bodies of men, but the heads of ferocious-looking birds and a feathered hairstyle, still others were a combination of man and fish.
Our particular genie had copious amounts of curly hair and a long beard. "The really big crazy-looking hair and the massive beard were part of making him really stand out," says McMahon, who also draws attention to the "little fringed outfit that shows off these incredibly muscular legs".
The impact of all the genies side by side in the palace would have been to convey the strength and virility of the Assyrian empire.
Across the belly of the genie was a smattering of cuneiform in the now extinct language, Akkadian. The text is what's known as Ashurnasirpal's "standard inscription"; it lays out in minute detail his many kingly accomplishments, from treading on the necks of foes to being "king of the universe", and was carved on many of the reliefs and sculptures that filled the halls of his palace at ˆ.
"It's my favourite ancient archaeological site," says Mark Altaweel, an Iraqi-American archaeologist whose ancestors come from Mosul, not far from Nimrud. "You did see the reliefs in place, you can see the rooms. Even the ancient floors were sort of wobbly and, in some ways, that gave it the ancient feel. You got a sense of what a palace was like when you walked in there."
Sometimes, however, even protective spirits need protecting. At some point since Nimrud's excavation, this genie relief was moved into a storage room from where it disappeared. It's believed to have been taken in the 1990s, during the chaos of the first Gulf War, but no one knows for sure.
The genie's whereabouts were completely unknown for about ten years. Eventually, in 2002, just before the second Gulf War, it turned up in London, England, one of the world's largest antiquities markets.
Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Unit went to collect the genie, but it's unclear who legally owns it so, for the last fourteen years, it has been locked up in a secure storage unit belonging to London's Metropolitan Police. "The problem is that the burden of proof on objects, when they are looted, is on the authorities to show that it really was removed illegally," says Altaweel.
This can be a challenge.

Rico says if it was removed legally, there'd be paperwork...