French president Nicolas Sarkozy showed one of the five fragments to his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, some minutes after the two leaders arose from a memorable lunch in Paris on Tuesday.

Egyptian officials said the artefacts (a slab with sepia and blue tones featuring two figures in profile) from a 3,200-year-old tomb near Luxor, were stolen from Egypt in the 1980s.

Egypt severed ties with the Louvre museum in October 2009, as France insistently claimed the fragments had been acquired "in good faith" in 2000 and 2003, amid lingering doubts as to whether the artifacts had been taken from Egypt illegally years before.

Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, has been leading aggressive strategies ; aimed at reclaiming what he insists are antiquities stolen from his country and sold to leading world museums.

-APA