HONG KONG — Officers on the Indonesian resort island of Bali found a primate the size of a human toddler curled up in a rattan basket this weekend — in the middle of an international airport.

“At first, we thought it was a monkey,” Dewa Delanata, the head of the quarantine office at Bali’s international airport, told the Jakarta Post newspaper. The officers were afraid to open the basket, he added, because they assumed that the animal “would be aggressive and run loose in the departure area.”

It turns out that the 2-year-old primate was a sleeping orangutan.

Officials say it was drugged and then smuggled into the airport on Friday by a Russian tourist. “The Russian deliberately used an inhumane method to take the orangutan to Russia,” Mr. Dewa said.