Beijing  - Chinese lawyers said Friday that they had filed a lawsuit with a Paris court in a last-minute bid to stop the auction of two bronze animal heads that were allegedly stolen from China by British and French troops 150 years ago.

"We handed the lawsuit to the Paris court just now," Xie Tongxiang, one of the leaders of a group petitioning for the return of the bronzes to China, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The lawyers asked the court to order the withdrawal of the two heads from the auction of a Yves Saint Laurent art collection scheduled to be held by Christie's in Paris beginning Monday, Xie said.

He said the plaintiff was listed as the Hong Kong-based Aixin Gioro Clan Association, which uses the family name of the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911) imperial family.

Christie's last week said the auction of the heads would proceed despite mounting objections from Chinese people in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The bronze rat and rabbit heads are believed to be part of a set of 12 representing the animals of the Chinese zodiac.

They were cast in the late 1750s and displayed at Beijing's Old Summer Palace, from where they were believed to have been looted in the razing of the palace by a British- and French-led force from eight foreign powers during the second Opium War.

The directors of the Old Summer Palace, known in Chinese as Yuanmingyuan, decided not to act as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, Xie said.

In 2007, the last time one of the bronzes came up for auction, Macao-based billionaire Stanley Ho bought the horse's head pre-auction for about 9 million dollars and donated it to the Chinese government.

Five of the animal heads are now in China, according to Chinese media, while the location of the other five remained unknown.

Xie said earlier that the lawyers working to stop the sale are unwilling to negotiate a private agreement to buy the bronzes.

China's Foreign Affairs Ministry last week said the bronze heads were "precious cultural treasures which were looted by the joint Anglo-French forces."

"China has incontrovertible ownership of those objects, which should be returned to China," ministry spokeswomen Jiang Yu told reporters. (dpa)