A village postman was detained by police yesterday after offering for sale a lock of hair and other items from the mummy of the Pharaoh Rameses II.

Jean-Michael Diebolt, from St Egrève, near Grenoble, was facing possible charges of receiving stolen property after he put an advertisement on the internet offering the hair, samples of the embalming resin and fragments of bandages from the 3,200-year-old remains of the Egyptian ruler.

The affair was being taken seriously because the 50-year-old postman, who is a part-time journalist and writer, said that his father was a member of a team of experts who analysed the mummy in France in 1976.

He offered photographs and certificates to prove the authenticity of the artefacts, for which he is charging €2,000 (£1,350) to €2,500 (£1,675) per lot.

The mummy was flown to Paris in 1976 on a trip that the French state treated with the protocol of a royal visit. The remains of the pharaoh, who reigned from 1279 to 1213BC and is believed to have died in his eighties, arrived to a state welcome at Le Bourget airport with an Egyptian passport citing its profession as “King [deceased]”. It was returned to the Cairo Museum and no mummy of such importance has left Egypt before or since.

While police were trying to check the authenticity of the items, Mr Diebolt’s action sparked a diplomatic incident between Paris and Cairo. Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said: “If these elements are authentic, it would be a scandal that would risk harming relations between France and Egypt.”

The French Foreign Ministry said that it was following the affair closely. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, a Louvre museum Egyptologist who took part in the 1976 study, said that she did not believe that anyone would have clipped hair from the mummy. However, she added, it would be “a shameful sacrilege towards human history” if it proved to be true.

Detectives seized a dozen plastic packets containing samples of hair and centimetre-long scraps of bandage from the postman’s home. Officials at the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Grenoble said that fragments of hair and bandage had fallen from the mummy when its shroud was unbound in Paris in 1976.

They had been sent to 40 laboratories for analysis, including the commission’s institute in Grenoble. “We do not know what became of these fragments,” said François Michel, deputy director.

Sonia Diebolt, the seller’s wife, said that her husband had put the items on the internet as a joke, “not really for making money, just to see if people were interested”. The “samples”, as she called them, were genuine, she said. “They came from his father, who is dead. I don’t know if his father had the right to take them but they are real enough.”

Mr Diebolt’s advertisement was still online last night. “I am selling a lock of hair that belonged to Rameses II,” it reads. “A team of four researchers, including my father, were given the task of analysing the hair, resins, pieces of bandage at the CEA Grenoble. As proof, I can provide a copy of the results of these analyses . . . I must be the only person in the world to possess such samples.”

Rameses, whose most famous queen was Nefertari, was entombed in the Valley of Kings. The mummy was removed and hidden in a cave where it was found in 1881.

Lawyers said that it was not clear what offence Mr Diebolt, who has been released by police without charge, might have committed, since any “receiving” would have been done by his late father.

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