France has begun the repatriation of over 3,500 archaeological artefacts to Ethiopia after they were taken from the county in the 1980s to Paris for study.

French Foreign Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, who handed over two prehistoric stone axes, called “bifaces”, and a stone cutter to Ethiopia’s Tourism Minister Selamawit Kassa, during a visit to the national museum in Addis Ababa, noted that the gesture stemmed from the two countries longstanding bilateral agreement on cooperating in the fields of archaeology and palaeontology.

The artifacts which are stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa, will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday, Kassa said.

“This is a handover, not a restitution, in that these objects have never been part of French public collections,” Laurent Serrano, Culture Adviser at the French Embassy, said during the handover ceremony.

“These artifacts, which date back between 1 and 2 million years, were found during excavations carried out over several decades at a site near the Ethiopian capital,” he added.

The tools are “samples of nearly 3,500 artefacts from the excavations that were carried out on the Melka Kunture site”, a cluster of prehistoric sites south of the capital that were excavated under the direction of a late French researcher, Barrot said.

Death toll from the landslides that struck eastern Uganda on Wednesday has risen to 20 as more bodies buried under the mud were retrieved on Friday, officials have confirmed.

Spokesperson of the Uganda Red Cross Society, Irene Kasiita, who spoke to journalists on Saturday on the situation, said search efforts were still on in the affected area.

Kasiita told reporters that bodies of four more people were found on Friday while a fifth person, one of the injured in the landslides, died at Mbale Hospital.

She added that thus far, 750 people had been displaced, with 216 of those living temporarily at a neighboring school while others were being housed by relatives.

The Bulambuli Resident District Commissioner, Faheera Mpalanyi, who also spoke to reporters, said soldiers have been deployed to help with the digging.

“More bodies are still buried under the heaps of soils and stones and we are trying as much as we can to recover them,” Mpalanyi said.

Local officials said an excavator would be brought to assist in the rescue efforts, but the roads were covered in mud and rain was still falling which has impacted thr area with about 50 acres homesteads and farmlands spread downhill.

Also speaking, the lawmaker from the Bulambuli district, Irene Muloni, said the government would help relocate residents from the landslide-prone area.

“Waterfalls are everywhere, and the rainfall is excessive,” she said, urging everyone who had lost their home to seek refuge with relatives and “leave this dangerous place.”

The landslides which were triggered following torrential rains, had engulfed six villages in the mountainous district of Bulambuli, 280 kilometers (175 miles) east of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, on Wednesday night with more than 125 houses destroyed.