Peru delivery man found carrying 800-year-old mummy in bag

The mummy found inside a cooler box used by a delivery service worker in Puno, Peru.

Police in Peru have seized a mummified corpse from a man who claimed it was his “girlfriend.” The mummy was found when cops searched the man because he was acting drunk at an archaeological site, the BBC reported.

The man, a delivery driver, said he kept the mummy in his room and considered it his “spiritual girlfriend.” He told cops that he had taken it out in a food delivery bag to show it to his friends.

Photos released by Peru’s Ministry of Culture and accessed by AFP show the mummy lying in a red bag that is commonly used for food deliveries. The bag bears the logo of Pedidos Ya, a popular takeout company in Peru, NBC reported.

In a statement released on February 26, the ministry said that the "mummified adult male individual, presumably from the eastern area of Puno", a region in the Peruvian Andes some 1,300 kilometers (more than 800 miles) southeast of Lima. It is estimated to be 600 to 800 years old.

The man, 26-year-old Julio Cesar Bermejo, will remain in detention while investigators look into the case, a government official told AFP on Tuesday.

“It [the mummy] sleeps in my bedroom, with me. There’s my bed, the TV set and next to it, there’s Juanita. I take care of it. It’s like, if you’ll pardon the expression, as if it were my spiritual girlfriend,” Bermejo told a media outlet in an interview that has gone viral online.

He added that his father had brought the ancient relic home around three decades ago.

The ministry of culture has now taken possession of the mummified corpse "with the aim of protecting and preserving this heritage."

(With inputs from AFP)