A town’s golden weathervane mysteriously vanished in 1999. The thief was just identified after he used his credit card to mail it back.

A rueful thief has returned a golden decorative cockerel stolen in a French village, a prosecutor stated on Tuesday, lifting the veil on its mysterious disappearance practically 25 years in the past.

The iron-wrought painted cockerel was taken in April 1999 from the highest of an out of doors Catholic cross in Bessan, a village of 5,500 inhabitants situated between Beziers and Agde in southwestern France.

Locals had been stored guessing as to its whereabouts till the steel fowl was despatched in a parcel to a historian, Michel Sabatery.

He had stored the thriller within the public eye by writing about it in newspapers and on social media.

When he acquired the statue in November, Sabatery knowledgeable the mayor’s workplace, which in flip alerted the prosecutor of Beziers, Raphael Balland.

Police rapidly recognized the thief, largely as a result of he had paid for the parcel postage together with his personal bank card, Bessan mayor Stephane Pepin-Bonet, advised AFP.

When he was confronted by police, the thief confessed, Balland stated, telling them he had taken the cockerel — a weathervane — on the evening of a drunken social gathering.

As soon as he had sobered up, he felt too ashamed to offer it again and hid it in his basement, the prosecutor stated.

Almost 1 / 4 of a century later, the person, now in his late 40s, re-discovered the cockerel within the cellar and determined it was time to return it.

The weathervane can be put again on the iron mission cross in a forthcoming ceremony, Pepin-Bonet stated, however this time “very well connected so it could possibly’t fly away once more”.

The mayor appeared able to forgive what he stated was “probably a youthful indiscretion” however stated he would remind folks on the ceremony that ornaments just like the cockerel had been a part of the village’s heritage, which “possibly does not have nice worth however belongs to all people”.

The prosecutor declined to expose the id of the thief, who has nothing to worry from the regulation as a result of France’s statute of limitations — six years for petty theft — makes him immune from prosecution.