Precious US stamp found six decades after its theft  

New York: A rare US stamp known as the "Inverted Jenny" has been recovered 61 years after its theft.

The stamp was officially donated Thursday to the American Philatelic Research Library (APRL), according to a release from the US Attorney´s office in New York.

The Inverted Jenny stamp came from a sheet of 100 stamps printed in 1918, and gained fame for being misprinted upside down.

The sheet was later broken up and individual stamps sold to collectors.

The stamp has an image of the Curtiss Jenny JN-4HM biplane modified for shuttling mail.

It commemorated the US Postal Service´s first airmail flight on May 15, 1918, with a value of 24 cents per stamp.

On Thursday, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara announced the return of one of the stolen stamps.

Investigators recovered the stamp after the Spink auction house in New York alerted authorities that an individual had tried to sell the stamp.

The owner Keelin O´Neill assured the FBI during questioning that he had inherited the "Inverted Jenny" from his grandfather, now deceased.

O´Neill agreed to relinquish the stamp to authorities once he learned it was stolen.

The returned stamp is one of four from a block stolen from collector Ethel B. Stewart McCoy in 1955.

Three of the four stamps stolen from McCoy -- who died in 1980 -- are entrusted to the APRL. The fourth is still missing.

At a Robert A. Siegel auction on Tuesday in New York, an Inverted Jenny stamp from the original sheet of 100 sold for $1.2 million to a private buyer.