Greece returned to Albania on Thursday two headless marble statues stolen from the museum of Butrint in 1991 and located by police near Athens six years later, the Greek culture ministry said.

The four-foot (1.2 metre) statues of a young male and a woman believed to be the ancient Greek hunt goddess Artemis had since been kept at the Museum of Piraeus.

Their origin was confirmed in 2003 by Albanian archaeologists.

The statues were found in Koropi, a rural area a few kilometres (miles) south of Athens in the possession of two Greeks who were jailed in 2004.

The presumed Artemis statue, which dates from the second century BCE, shows the goddess in mid-stride and probably carried an arrow quiver on its back, the ministry said in a statement. The male statue dates from the second century AD.

Both are missing their heads and arms, and carry listing numbers from the museum of Butrint.

Inhabited since prehistoric times, Butrint was a Greek colony, a Roman city and a Byzantine bishopric, and was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1992.