Kathmandu, Sept. 14 -- Earlier this year, a10thcentury stone figure of Uma Maheswar, which had been stolen from Patan's Gahiti 50 years ago was traced to the Denver Art Museum. This week, the museum handed over the antiquity to the Nepal Embassy in Washington DC.

In an exclusive, theNepali Times reported in Januarythat the statue that was an object of daily worship by the local community had been torn out of a shrine in Patan in the 1960s, and had found its way through a private collector to the museum in Denver as 'art'.

Nine months later, in the latest in a slew of stolen artefacts being returned to Nepal from the United States, the Denver Art Museum handed over the statue to Nepal's Ambassador Yuvaraj Khatiwada in Washington DC on Su...