Police in Peru have seized a mummified human, between 600 and 800 years old, from a former food delivery man who claimed to have had it at his home for three decades.
The mummy was in the isothermal bag the man had once used to deliver food to people’s homes.
The man, 26-year-old Julio Cesar Bermejo, will remain in detention while investigators look into the case, a government official told AFP news agency on Tuesday.
Bermejo told local media that the mummy, “Juanita”, was “like my spiritual girlfriend”.
“At home, she’s in my room. She sleeps with me. I take care of her,” he said in a video that went viral on social media.
This handout picture by Puno TV shows members of the Decentralized Directorate of Culture of Puno and the police investigating the discovery of a mummy inside a cooler box used by a delivery service worker in Puno [AFP]
Bermejo said his father brought the mummy home almost 30 years ago.
According to the Ministry of Culture, the pre-Hispanic relic was a “mummified adult male individual, presumably from the eastern area of Puno”, a region in the Peruvian Andes some 1,300km (808 miles) southeast of Lima.
“It’s not a Juanita, it’s a Juan,” a specialist at the ministry affirmed, adding the mummy was of a man at least 45 years old.
The body was wrapped in bandages in the foetal position.
Police found the remains in Bermejo’s bag on Saturday while patrolling a park in the city of Puno, where he had been hanging out with friends.
The mummy was in the isothermal bag the man had once used to deliver food to people’s homes.
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