How a space rock vanished from Africa and showed up for sale across an ocean.  

Millennia ago a piece of the sky fell toward East Africa, streaking overhead, born of an ancient collision of asteroids. The meteorite landed, probably with more of a thud than a boom, in a river valley where camels now forage near the village of El Ali in Somalia.

Known locally as Shiid-birood (“the iron rock”), the El Ali meteorite is 13.6 metric tons of iron and nickel. For generations it rested in the ground some 24 kilometers (15 miles) outside the village, becoming a landmark that was featured in folklore, lullabies and poems. According to one story, the region had been a green paradise until its inhabitants stopped believing in Waaq, the local god, who punished them with volcanic stones, leaving behind the El Ali meteorite as a reminder of their folly. Over the centuries people hammered the brown rock from the heavens with stones, banging off flakes of cold iron, or used it as a whetstone. Children pretended to ride it like a horse.

Now, though, the El Ali meteorite is gone. Shaky cell-phone videos suggest the rock is being stored in China, where sellers hope to hock it for millions, either whole or in pieces. How did it get there? The journey of the ninth-largest meteorite in the world involves lies, smuggling and possibly death. Mystery surrounds its departure from its landing site, a lawless region of Somalia, one of the poorest and most contested places on the planet. In August, a Somali cultural minister asked the UNESCO World Heritage Center to recognize the meteorite as part of the country’s patrimony, calling for its return in a statement. The fate of the cosmic cannonball is now anyone’s guess.

For centuries the El Ali meteorite, a brownish, pitted boulder some two meters wide and one meter tall, went unnoticed by anyone but locals. Village elders say that about 80 years ago, during World War II, the Italian army suggested removing it for study. Later, United Nations peacekeeping forces eyed it, and so did militias after the 1991 collapse of Somalia’s government. They were all drawn by the mystery of Shiid-birood, seeing the curious iron rock sitting on the outskirts of a Somali camel-herder village as an object of research—or at least scrap metal. But locals stopped all these extraction attempts.

Then, in September 2019, opal hunters scouring the surrounding desert reported the meteorite to a nearby mining outfit—the Kureym Mining and Rocks Company, a Somalia-based firm led by five traders and businessmen in Mogadishu, the country’s capital. Using a hammer, prospectors chiseled a 90-gram sample from the space rock they renamed “Nightfall” and sent it off to Nairobi for analysis. Those samples confirmed for the first time that the meteorite was indeed extra-terrestrial, comprising some 44 percent iron and 45 percent nickel.

We know from news reports and human rights groups that sometime in February 2020, the stone was removed from the village El Ali. The area is largely controlled by al-Shabaab, or “the Youth,” a militant affiliate of al-Qaeda that has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Al-Shabaab ruled Mogadishu into the late 2000s but was then dislodged by African Union forces. The organization is responsible for numerous bombings and killings, including the massacre of 148 people at Kenya’s Garissa University in 2015, as well as an “extensive racketeering operation” in Somalia, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Given the group’s authority in the region, it seems likely that it orchestrated the looting of the meteorite or at least assisted in it.

No one knows exactly what happened after the meteorite was carted out of El Ali, though. News reports from the time say the rock was “forcibly taken” by al-Shabaab. They describe large cranes excavating the stone amid gunfights that reportedly left several people dead, including civilians. Some accounts put the toll even higher, with local leaders describing in news reports two full-scale firefights—one during the dig and one as the meteorite was trucked away—between al-Shabaab and fighters from the clan-based Ma’awisley militia. Some leaders say the fighting included beheadings. But Abdulkadir Abiikar Hussein, a geologist at Almaas University in Mogadishu, calls the reports of bloodshed “exaggerations. 

Whichever way the extraction went down, most accounts agree on what happened next. Militia members drove the meteorite to the nearby town of Buq Aqable, then reportedly sold it to the Kureym mining company for $264,000.

From there the truck carrying the stolen space rock started to make its way toward Mogadishu, but it was detained on the drive. Somalian government officials impounded the vehicle for inspection, Hussein says, after security forces on the road into the city grew suspicious of the big metal boulder in the back of a truck and arrested the lone driver. They sent the meteorite to a warehouse near the local airport. At that point, in late February 2020, the government’s mining ministry called in Hussein. He measured, sampled and tested the meteorite in the warehouse, making the first characterizations of the cosmic rock, which would appear later in scholarly descriptions.

Somehow, however, the meteorite was released. By December 2020 Shiid-birood was back in the hands of Kureym, although the details of the transaction are unclear (Hussein and others say it was corrupt). Kureym representatives declined to comment on the record for this article.

Scientists outside Somalia first learned about the meteorite from representatives of the mining company late that year. After Kureym took possession of the stone, Nicholas Gessler, a now retired researcher of anthropology, archaeology and meteorites, got an e-mail about a large meteorite. The sender offered Gessler a chance to study it, saying they were looking for buyers. Piqued by a longtime interest in iron meteorites used by Indigenous people, he agreed to get it analyzed for publication in the Meteoritical Bulletin, a necessity to verify its provenance as a meteorite. Investigating the El Ali meteorite has since called on every one of his areas of expertise, he says, and became an obsession leading him to compile an extensive website tracking the object and what he can piece together of its sordid history. “Nothing is clear,” Gessler says. “People have repeatedly asked for clarity and documentation. None has been provided.”

In January 2021, after Gessler agreed to help register the meteorite, a representative of Kureym sent him a sample. A lump of iron rock, one side weathered brown, the other shining dully from the saw’s incision, arrived in a FedEx package. Around the same time, the company also shipped two sliced chunks of iron rock totaling 70 grams to geologist Chris Herd, curator of the meteorite collection at the University of Alberta.

Both researchers say they wish they had known the full story of the meteorite and its contested ownership at the time. Up to that point, rumors of any violence during its excavation had been confined to Somalian news reports. Only four years later, in June 2025, did a Meteoritics & Planetary Science report by geoscientist Ali H. Egeh of the Somali National University first communicate to the scientific community the “secrecy and uncertainty” surrounding the meteorite and its removal from its home country.

“When I first did the work, I had no knowledge of what had happened, the tragic circumstances,” Herd says. “We were, in retrospect, getting quite biased information” about both the removal of the El Ali meteorite and its export to China. Canadian law, Herd adds, is very strict about the export of meteorites. Temporary loans of samples for study are permitted, but permanent ones are much more sensitive. “For Somalia, this would qualify as having outstanding significance and national importance,” he says. “It is a real shame it has been wholesale exported.” By Dan Vergano edited by Clara Moskowitz, SCI AM