The melodrama between Yoko Ono and her chauffeur, playing out in New York City courtrooms and across newspaper headlines 11 years ago, appeared to end with that two-month span of accusations, denials and threats. The chauffeur, Koral Karsan, was sent back to his native Turkey after 60 days in jail, and Ms. Ono returned to her public creative pursuits and the side of her life she has long kept private, within the walls of the apartment in the Dakota where she once lived with her husband, John Lennon.

But shortly after meeting with Ms. Ono last month in Manhattan, the police in Berlin this week announced what amounts to an audacious coda to that 2006 chain of events. The police said they have mounting evidence that Mr. Karsan, even as he was accusing Ms. Ono of sexual harassment and demanding $2 million to stay quiet, was stealing Lennon’s personal effects from the cupboards of her apartment in the Dakota.

Or was he? Mr. Karsan, 61, in a brief statement Friday from his home in Turkey, said Ms. Ono gave him the Lennon items in 2006. That claim suggests a likely return to the spotlight for the fraught relationship born years ago inside a hired limousine.

Many of the missing items were found earlier this year, in storage at a bankrupt German auction house, but others, including a sculpture of Mr. Lennon and “very personal documents,” are still missing, the police said. Mr. Karsan remains in Turkey and cannot be extradited to Germany. “We think he was the thief,” said Martin Steltner, a spokesman for the state prosecutor’s office in Berlin.