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Museum chiefs say they are bemused over the sudden lifting of the display dome protecting a large lump of the

The lid mysteriously rises as visitors gaze at the space rock which crashed to Earth on February 15, 2013, injuring 1,500 people.

Staff insist they did nothing to cause the dome to lift, setting off an alarm, and questioned if the meteorite was seeking to "escape".

"We laughingly said that the brother of the Chelyabinsk meteorite... said hi to our space rock, and ours breathed out in response," said Ayvar Valeev, head of public relations at the State History Museum of the Southern Urals in Chelyabinsk.

(Image: Dennis Aleksandrov)

There were reports last month of a Chelyabinsk 2 meteorite lighting up the sky but it was later said to be a rocket launch.

"Jokes aside our female keepers are still a bit shaken," he said.

Others fear that the eerie lifting could have been a hi-tech attempt to steal the meteorite or test the security.

"Usually it's quite a saga to raise the meteorite's dome," said Valeev.

"There were four electric motors at its edges. The whole structure is heavy. There is an alarm system in place plus all sort of red tape linked to raising it.

"It never happened before that the dome just rose like this by itself."

(Image: The Siberian Times)

Security staff ran to the scene and closed the dome after hearing the alarm.

The museum's director Vladimir Bogdanovsky said: "We have not managed to establish the reason of the dome's sudden rise.

"We spoke to all our specialists in electronics and wiring, who said unanimously that it was impossible to have it opening by itself.

"Yet it happened.

"Right after it happened I queried what could it possibly be, and there is no answer so far."

Another museum insider Ruslan Safin denied the lid could be lifted by a potential thief using a remote control, adding the equipment had been checked and was in normal working order.

"Only staff have access to the remote control and none of our employees pushed the button," he insisted.

"Luckily, nothing bad happened. The exhibit is in one piece, there was no panic, no one got injured.

"So we are working as normal. We will try to establish the reason."

(Image: Chelyavinsk region's governor)

Staff have signed an official paper stating that it was a "self-rising" incident.

This is part of the Chelyabinsk meteor which landed in Lake Chebarkul and was later retrieved.

Many of the injuries were from shattered glass. Hundreds of people needed counselling from psychologists.

Only later did locals understand how fortunate they were that the meteorite's flight path led to this Urals lake.

Had it struck the city with a population of 1.13 million, it could have caused a massive death toll.

The FSB security service in 2017 claimed to have stopped a theft of a chunk of the Chelyabinsk meteorite weighing 2.5kg.