A Stradivarius violin – possibly worth several million euros – was handed in at a Swiss lost-property office after a hapless musician left it on a train, police said.

The owner had lent the precious instrument to a musician friend who took it on a train on Friday but forgot it when he got off at Bern, Switzerland, police said.

After a fruitless search by train staff, surveillance cameras spotted a passenger walking off with the violin at a different station and police launched an appeal for help.

‘Knights’ rob festival

A gang of thieves dressed as knights and armed with a sword and an axe robbed the organisers of a mediaeval festival in northeast France on Monday and made off with €20,000, police said.

The theft took place on Monday as organisers were counting revenues from the festival in Bitche, near France’s border with Germany, a spokesman for regional police in Lorraine said.

“According to witnesses, there were three or four individuals, masked and wearing medieaval attire,” the spokesman said.

Thief begs for life in jail

Zimbabwe’s prisons are often condemned for squalid overcrowding but a thief begged a magistrate to lock him up permanently, state media reported yesterday.

Repeat offender Lovemore Manyika, 22, pleaded for life in a note during mitigation after he was convicted for housebreaking.

“Life in prison is better than life in the streets,” he is reported to have said in his note read out by the state prosecutor, according to The Herald newspaper.

The court sentenced Mr Manyika to three years in jail.

No monkey business

Hong Kong has hailed the success of a birth control programme for the city’s wild monkeys, saying the primates’ numbers have dropped 15 per cent over four years.

Officials said the latest monkey census showed the population stood at 1,965 last year, from 2,320 in 2008.