One of three skulls returned to Madagascar is believed to belong to King Toera, who was slain by French colonial forces.

France has returned to Madagascar three human skulls kept at a Paris museum for 128 years, after they were looted during the colonial period, including one believed to be that of a Madagascan king decapitated by French troops.

The skull, presumed to be that of King Toera, and two others from the Sakalava ethnic group, were formally handed over at a ceremony held at the French Ministry of Culture on Tuesday.

French troops beheaded King Toera during a massacre of locals in 1897, with his skull then taken back to France as a trophy, and placed in Paris’s national history museum alongside hundreds of other remains from the Indian Ocean island.

“These skulls entered the national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in a context of colonial violence,” French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati said at the event.

The French minister’s Madagascar counterpart, Volamiranty Donna Mara, praised the handover, saying the taking of the skulls “has been, for more than a century, 128 years, an open wound in the heart of our island”.

“They are not collectors’ items; they are the invisible and indelible link that unites our present to our past,” Mara said.

Video from the event showed three boxes draped in traditional cloth being carried in a solemn procession to the handover ceremony in the ornate surroundings of France’s Culture Ministry.

A joint scientific committee confirmed that the skulls were from the Sakalava people, but said it could only “presume” that one belonged to King Toera, Dati said.

The event marked the first restitution of human remains since France passed a law facilitating the return of such artefacts in 2023.

With a third of the 30,000 specimens at Paris’s Musee de l’Homme being skulls and skeletons from around the world, countries including Australia and Argentina have filed their own restitution requests for the return of ancestral remains.

During a visit in April to the Madagascan capital, Antananarivo, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of seeking “forgiveness” for France’s “bloody and tragic” colonisation of Madagascar, which declared independence in 1960 after more than 60 years of colonial rule.

The skulls are set to return to the Indian Ocean island on Sunday, where they will be buried.

Minister Mara said the Madagascan government plans to honour the remains in a tribute coinciding with the anniversary of King Toera’s execution in late August 1897, during France’s colonisation of the Indian Ocean island.