An ornate brass antique eagle lectern stolen from Ashton Keynes church in Wiltshire has turned up at an antiques fair in Romania where it's plaque inscribed with 'Ashton Keynes' was spotted by an alert local who set about tracking it down on the internet to see if it was stolen. A subsequent email to Wilshire police, which at first was thought to be scam, contained the local's mobile phone number and after a conversation in halting English, PC Steve Harvey confirmed that it was the stolen item.
 
PC Harvey said, "The email from Romania came completely out of the blue. I thought it was a scam email but it had a mobile number on it, so I called the person, who didn't speak very good English, and he said he'd seen this unusual piece in a village in Romania and when he looked at it, he noticed the Ashton Keynes engraving. He searched the internet for some sort of news report and eventually ended up emailing me. We're now working with Interpol and I'm reasonably confident it will be returned."
 
The lectern was the only item stolen in the burglary in September in what is believed to have been broad daylight.
 
The Ashton Keynes stolen lectern was not raised as a Salvo Theft Alert. Theft alerts for items stolen from churches or war memorials have been raised free of charge by Salvo since 1995 and some of these have resulted in recoveries at antique fairs.