Man caught hawking relic of St Andrew's body
Detectives have returned a religious relic which is believed to be part of the body of Christ's apostle Andrew to the Russian Orthodox Church.
It was seized from a man trying to sell it for $25,000.
The small fragment, which believers consider to be part of St Andrew, one of Jesus' 12 apostles, had been missing since the late 1980s.
The artefact had gone missing with its ornate cylindrical reliquary, or case, from a chapel in the southern town of Stavropol.
Russia's RTR government television and NTV private television have shown police film of the seizure of the relic from a man in a car on a Moscow street.
Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has thanked Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo in a ceremony at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where the relic will now be kept.
Police and customs officers frequently hand over to church authorities icons and other sacred objects which by law can't be exported.
