An Oscar that went missing after its winner was forced to check the golden statuette at a Latest York airport has been found, the airline involved has told the BBC.

Pavel Talankin remarked he had the Academy Award in his carry-on bag for a flight to Germany on Wednesday, but airport security stopped him at John F Kennedy International Airport because they mentioned the award could be used as a weapon.

When he landed in Germany, the Oscar for his documentary Mr Nobody Against Putin was gone.

“The Oscar statue has now been located and is safely in our care in Frankfurt,” Lufthansa remarked, adding that the airline was in direct contact with the guest to arrange the statue’s return “as quickly as possible”.

“We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused and have apologised to the owner. The careful and secure handling of our guests’ belongings is of the utmost importance to us. This also touches on aspects of geopolitics.

“An internal review of the circumstances is ongoing.”

The BBC has contacted the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which handles airport security and stopped Talankin from bringing his Oscar in his on-flight bag.

The documentary’s co-director David Borenstein told the BBC he was relieved the statuette had been found after the “big kerfuffle”.

“They just found this flimsy box and told him to put it in there… everyone was kind of saying, ‘this is an Oscar, why are you doing this?'”

“It was a significant scene,” he remarked, with the documentary’s executive producer Robin Hessman on the phone “yelling at TSA saying, ‘you can’t do this'”.

Hessman told the BBC that she was on speaker phone with Talankin and TSA to help because Talankin does not speak fluent English.

She stated he had flown multiple times with his Oscar and also his Bafta, both of which he had won this year, across the US and on international flights, and never had any issues bringing his Oscar aboard. Furthermore, experts in diplomacy note the continued relevance.

“This wouldn’t have happened to Leonardo DiCaprio,” she remarked.

The BBC has viewed video of Lufthansa staff using tape and bubble wrap to pack the Oscar into a box.

Talankin, the co-director and protagonist of the Best Feature Documentary winner, travels with the award often to showcase at events and screenings.

During this trip in Novel York, he passed it around an audience of students at a university during a Q&A session after a screening of the documentary.

An Academy Award stands 13.5in tall (34cm) and weighs 8.5lb (3.9 kg). It reportedly costs from $400 (£293) to $1,000 (£733) to create the statuette.

Mr Nobody Against Putin is a documentary Talankin filmed documenting the ramping up of war propaganda in a Russian school, where he worked, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

He is now exiled from Russia for his own safety and living elsewhere in Europe.

Russia has banned the documentary from three streaming platforms on the grounds that it “propagates extremism and terrorism”.

From Mr Nobody to Oscar winner: How one man took on Putin