A cleaner who feared a body he found was a murder victim had in fact found a 900-year-old mummy.
The preserved remains were discovered in a cardboard box by street cleaners in north-western Peru.
The mummy, thought to date back to 1100 AD, was found wrapped in rope and dumped inside the box in front of an archaeological dig in the city of Trujillo.
It is thought to have been stolen from the archaeological site known as Chan Chan which was the capital of the Chimu Empire, an urban civilisation that appeared on the Peruvian coast around 1100 AD.
The discovery was made in the early hours of the morning as the cleaners swept up the streets close to the dig.
Cleaner Otilio Padilla Miramontes, 54, said: 'It looked just like any other box dumped on the streets.
Forensics: Police were called by the cleaners who made the discovery by an archaeological dig site in Trujillo
Wrapped up: The mummified remains were discovered in a box, wrapped in rope, by cleaners in Peru
But when I opened it I nearly died of heart attack as I saw this grinning skull staring up at me.
'I had no idea it was an ancient mummy, I thought it was someone who had been murdered so I immediately called the police.'
A police spokesman said: 'We quickly established that this was not a recent skeleton.
'But we are now investigating how it ended up in a box outside of the main archaeological site.
'Our suspicion is that someone tried to steal it and had maybe left it in the box to collect later.'
The remains were taken to the regional Directorate of Culture for examination.
A spokesman there said: 'This is not a Chimu mummy and is most likely pre-Hispanic suggesting it is from another culture pre-dating the Hispanic arrival.'
