The museum at Southern Illinois University in the U.S. returned a Ptolemaic bronze cat casket this week to the Egyptian embassy in New York. The bronze casket, in which ancient Egyptians put the remains of cats, was purchased by the Southern Illinois University in 1996 from a private collector in Paris, Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of the Cairo-based Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in a faxed statement today. The illicit nature of the casket's acquisition was discovered when the university museum director Donna Bachman, asked the supreme council for details about the archaeological site from which it was excavated, the statement said. "Dr. Hawass immediately recognized that the piece had been illegally smuggled out of the country," it said. "Bachman and the board of directors of the museum accepted Hawass's request that they hand the piece over to the Egyptian embassy in New York." Egypt has returned to Cairo some 5,000 ancient Egyptian artifacts that were illegally smuggled out of the country since 2002, the statement said.