Scotland Yard has a new mystery: the case of the London mayor and the red leather Iraqi cigar box.

British police confirmed Tuesday they are examining an Iraqi cigar case belonging to London mayor Boris Johnson to determine whether it is a looted Iraqi artifact. Johnson says he handed over the case, which once belonged to Saddam Hussein's deputy, on Monday.

Johnson, a Conservative politician, journalist and sometime TV quiz-show host who was elected mayor last month, says he took the case in 2003 from the bombed-out home of former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz.

In a column for Tuesday's Daily Telegraph newspaper, Johnson said he had found the case a few days after Baghdad fell to American forces. Johnson, then working as a journalist, said he was taken to Aziz's ransacked villa: "And there, just by my toe, protruding from beneath a piece of dusty plywood, was the cigar case."

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Read Johnson's response to charges.

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