The Meteorite, the Paper Trail, and the Bloodshed: How Somalia’s Largest Space Rock Was Taken
For centuries, it lay half-buried in the soil of El Ali, in Somalia’s Hirshabelle region—too heavy to move, too important to ignore. The Indigenous community called it Shiid Birood, the iron stone. Children played around it. Blacksmiths shaped tools on its surface. Elders told stories of fire falling from the sky.
Then, in early 2020, the stone was torn from the earth.
Several members of the local community were killed trying to stop it.
What followed was not justice or accountability, but a carefully constructed fiction—one that transformed a site of violence and cultural heritage into a commodity with forged coordinates, shifting paperwork, and no acknowledged past.
A “Discovery” That Was Already News
According to a narrative later promoted to foreign buyers, museums, and intermediaries, the meteorite—now known internationally as the El Ali meteorite—was “discovered” on April 5, 2020, by gemstone prospectors near Beledweyne.
The story reads like adventure prose: chance, luck, scientific destiny.
But Somali audiences had already heard a very different story.
At least six Somali media outlets reported weeks earlier that a massive iron rock had been forcibly removed from its impact site following violent clashes with local residents. Videos circulated online showing the stone being taken away under armed protection. These reports predate the supposed “discovery.”
This was not an unknown object suddenly revealed. It was a known object violently extracted.
Who Owned the Stone? The Meteorite Answers
Those now claiming ownership argue that the meteorite belonged to no one until they took possession of it. One claimant has said he paid USD 1 million for the rock and another USD 500,000 “to Somalia,” adding that before his purchase, “no one” owned it.
But the meteorite itself tells another story.
Its surface is covered in hammered facets, many extending below ground level—physical evidence of centuries, possibly millennia, of use as an anvil and source of meteoritic iron. Anthropologists and legal scholars recognize such long-term labor as ownership by possession, particularly in Indigenous and customary contexts.
The sellers appear to have understood this risk. Samples taken for analysis came not from the worked surfaces shaped by generations of hands, but from the buried, unworked underside of the stone—the only part untouched by cultural use.
False Coordinates, Missing Permits
After the removal, paperwork followed.
Companies involved produced licenses and permits suggesting legality. But closer examination reveals striking irregularities.
Most notably, the GPS coordinates listed in official documents do not point to Hirshabelle at all, but to Qandala, a fishing village on the Gulf of Aden—hundreds of kilometers from the meteorite’s actual location. The coordinates are not approximate or erroneous; they are precise and geographically implausible.
Equally troubling, no valid prospecting permit for Hirshabelle has been produced. Available permits relate to Galmudug, a different federal member state altogether.
Why would a meteorite taken from Hirshabelle be licensed as if it came from elsewhere?
From Sacred Object to “Sample”
As the meteorite moved closer to export, its description quietly changed.
In early documents, it is referred to as a “meteorite stone” or “meteorite rock.” Later, it becomes a “sample”—a term that, under international trade norms, implies no commercial value and is typically used for testing or examination. At the same time, the same object was being marketed for extraordinary sums—initially as high as USD 200 million, before price fluctuations that suggest internal disputes rather than market logic.
The contradiction has never been explained.
Violence on the Ground, Silence Above
Perhaps the most disturbing question concerns how the meteorite was removed at all.
The impact site lies in an area that later fell under Al-Shabaab control, which today prevents access to researchers, journalists, and even the families of those killed. Yet the meteorite itself moved—through conflict, checkpoints, and bureaucracy—until it was safely out of reach.
This raises a deeply uncomfortable issue:
How did an object extracted amid armed conflict, from an area influenced or controlled by a designated terrorist group, pass so smoothly through state licensing and export procedures?
There is no public evidence of an investigation into the killings linked to the meteorite’s removal. Nor has there been a transparent accounting of how permits were issued despite false coordinates and missing jurisdictional authority. State complicity does not always require explicit collaboration. Sometimes it appears as administrative silence, as documents accepted without scrutiny, as laws ignored when inconvenient.
What the Scientists Asked For—and Didn’t Get
Scientists involved in studying the El Ali meteorite have repeatedly said they want one thing: the truth.
They have argued that the meteorite should remain intact, conserved in a public institution, with its provenance fully acknowledged. Over several years, they contacted more than a dozen museums, all of which asked the same question: Where exactly did this come from, and under what conditions was it removed?
To that question, no complete answer has been provided. What exists instead is a paper trail that documents only the movement of the stone through bureaucracy—not what happened on the ground, or who paid the price for its removal.
A Stone That Exposes a System
The El Ali meteorite is more than a scientific curiosity. It is a mirror held up to systems that routinely fail Indigenous communities in conflict zones: where cultural heritage is treated as extractable, where violence is laundered into legality, and where truth becomes negotiable once enough money is involved.
UNESCO may not protect objects in isolation. But it does protect sites, contexts, and the people who give them meaning. Strip those away, and all that remains is a very old rock—and a very modern injustice.
Shiid Birood fell from the sky thousands of years ago.
Its removal in 2020 tells a far more recent story—one of bloodshed, falsified records, and unanswered questions.
And until those questions are answered, the stone’s journey is not over.
HANAHR Online Editor