The granddaughter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini has said that blood and parts of his brain have been stolen to sell on the internet.

Alessandra Mussolini, a former showgirl turned MP, said she immediately informed the police when she found out.

The listing, on auction site Ebay, reportedly showed images of a wooden container and ampoules of blood.

Ebay, which does not allow the sale of human matter on its site, said that the listing was removed within hours.

The initial price requested for the material was 15,000 euros ($22,000; £13,000).

"This is very serious, these are the kinds of things we have to guard against," said Ms Mussolini, who was attending a seminar on internet crime when the listing was discovered.

Very serious. Very, very serious.

As one of the great European thinkers of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre popularised existentialism, became a working-class hero -- and was chased down the Champs Elysées by a pack of imaginary lobsters.

A previously unpublished account of the late French philosopher's improbable drug-induced crustacean visions has surfaced in New York, where a new book of conversations between Sartre and an old family friend will be published later this month.

John Gerassi, a New York professor of political science whose parents were close friends of Sartre, talked at length to the philosopher in the 1970s about his experiments with mescaline, a powerful hallucinogenic drug derived from a Mexican cactus.

Although it has long been known that Sartre experienced visions of lobsters -- which he sometimes referred to as crabs -- Gerassi's account offers startling new details of the philosopher's descent into near-madness as he battled to make sense of what he had come to regard as the intellectual absurdity of his life.