A Forklift, a Bag of Gold, and a Donkey: Turkey’s Most Unlikely Heist

Most robberies follow a familiar script. A target is chosen, a plan is drawn up, and if the criminal has any sense at all, a getaway route is arranged well in advance. Speed matters. Discretion matters more. What happened in the Melikgazi district of Kayseri, central Turkey, in early February 2026 followed none of those rules.

What unfolded instead was something far stranger, captured in full by CCTV cameras that recorded every moment of a heist so bizarre that local media struggled to describe it with a straight face. A stolen forklift. A jewellery store. A bag of gold. And, when it came time to run, an exit plan that no seasoned investigator could have predicted.

Exactly how it all came together and how it all fell apart is a story worth telling from the beginning.

A Machine Built for Work, Repurposed for Crime

Some time in the early hours, a masked figure arrived at a jewellery store in Kayseri’s Melikgazi district at the controls of a forklift. According to Turkish outlet NTV Turkey, the vehicle is believed to have been stolen before it arrived at the scene. Whatever its origins, the suspect had a clear purpose in mind.

Wearing a beanie hat and a surgical mask, the suspect maneuvered the forklift’s forks beneath the store’s metal shutters. With the machine doing the heavy lifting, the shutters gave way. Windows shattered. Access was forced. Within moments, a masked figure was inside.

CCTV footage, later released by Turkish authorities and distributed by the Anadolu Agency, captured the sequence with a level of detail that left little to the imagination. Investigators did not need to reconstruct the scene from fragments of evidence. Every step had been recorded.

Inside the Store, A Smash-and-Grab Gone Sideways

Once inside, the suspect moved fast. A display cabinet packed with gold jewellery was shoved from its position, hitting the floor and sending glass and valuables scattering across the tiles. With no time or means to move the store’s heavy safes, the suspect dropped to the floor and began gathering what could be carried by hand.

Gold pieces were stuffed into a bag loosely, hurriedly, opportunistic. Police would later confirm that approximately 150 grams of gold jewellery had been taken. At current market rates, that quantity carries real value, enough to make the effort worthwhile for someone willing to go to the lengths seen on that CCTV footage.

What the footage also showed, however, was a suspect working alone. No crew waited inside. No second pair of hands sorted through the haul. Just one masked figure in a ransacked store, with a bag of stolen gold and a decision to make about what came next. That decision, it turned out, was already made.

The Exit Strategy Nobody Saw Coming

Outside, no car idled at the curb. No motorbike sat ready to tear away into the night. What the suspect had arranged instead, and this is the part that prompted local media to describe the entire incident as “like a joke,”  was a donkey.

CCTV footage shows the suspect emerging from the damaged store and mounting the animal. Moments later, the donkey carried its rider away from the scene at whatever pace four legs and a full load of adrenaline could manage.

In the history of getaway vehicles, it is difficult to find a comparison. A donkey offers no speed advantage over a police patrol car. It generates no anonymity in an urban area with working security cameras. And it is, by every reasonable measure, not the animal one selects when planning a robbery with any serious expectation of escape.

And yet, there it was recorded in full, circulated across Turkish and international media within days, and received by readers around the world with a mixture of disbelief and involuntary amusement.

Police Weren’t Laughing

Whatever entertainment value the footage may have provided to onlookers, Turkish authorities treated the matter as the serious criminal case it was. A search operation was launched quickly after the incident, with investigators reviewing security camera footage from the area to identify the suspect.

Police identified the individual as M.Ç., a 26-year-old man, after cross-referencing footage from multiple cameras. Footage released following the arrest shows officers detaining the suspect outside a police station, and a separate clip shows M.Ç. being brought to a police vehicle.

Recovered alongside the suspect was the stolen gold, all 150 grams of it, buried in the ground near the scene. Video released by authorities shows officers digging through dirt to retrieve the bag, pulling the jewellery from its hiding place before returning it to the shop owner. Prosecutors are now preparing formal charges. An investigation remains underway.

How Kayseri Ended Up All Over the Internet

Within days of the footage being released, the story spread well beyond Turkey’s borders. International outlets picked it up, social media ran with it, and what began as a local crime report became something closer to a viral curiosity.

It is not hard to see why. At a time when news cycles move fast, and audiences have seen nearly everything, a jewellery heist that combines heavy machinery, stolen gold, and a donkey-based escape route cuts through the noise with ease. Kayseri is not a city that often makes international headlines. After M.Ç.’s night out, it did.

For the shop owner, of course, the story carries a different weight entirely. A damaged frontage, a ransacked store, shattered display cabinets, and an overnight ordeal captured for all to see, none of that disappears because the footage happens to be amusing. Police returned the gold, and charges are forthcoming, but the disruption left behind by that forklift is real and ongoing.

Funny Enough, It’s Happened Before

Strange as the Kayseri case may be, it is not the first time an animal has found itself at the center of a criminal incident that defied easy categorisation.

In December 2025, military police in the Brazilian municipality of Vicosa, in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, dealt with a rather different kind of offender. A capuchin monkey had spent several days terrorising the local area, raiding kitchens, biting residents, and interfering with electrical wiring in a way that left multiple homes without power.

Footage from the incident showed the capuchin wielding a large knife and bashing it against a wall with what can only be described as intent. In a separate clip, the monkey was caught smashing a birdcage against a wall, an act that freed a pet bird and prompted speculation about whether the animal had, in some loose sense of the word, accomplices.

Military police eventually caught up with the capuchin and took it into custody. Images circulated of the monkey seated in a cage in the back of a police vehicle, looking, by most accounts, thoroughly unrepentant. Officers in Kayseri may take some comfort from the comparison. At least their suspect did not wield a knife.

Where Things Stand Now

M.Ç. now faces formal legal proceedings in Turkey. Prosecutors have the CCTV footage, the recovered gold, and an arrest that followed from a getaway plan that, by any honest accounting, was never going to work.

What prosecutors do not yet have, at least not on the public record, is any clear explanation of why a 26-year-old man decided that a donkey was a sensible exit strategy after using a stolen forklift to break into a jewellery store. Whether the animal was owned, borrowed, or obtained through some other means has not been clarified in official statements.

What is clear is that the sequence of decisions made during the Kayseri heist will outlast whatever legal outcome eventually follows. Court cases conclude. Sentences are served. But footage of a masked suspect riding a donkey away from a smashed jewellery store caught on CCTV, broadcast across the world, and greeted with the kind of laughter that even the most composed observer finds hard to suppress, has a way of lasting rather longer than that.

M.Ç. may not have planned to make international news when he showed up to that Kayseri store in the early hours of February 2026. He may have had a very different outcome in mind.

What he got instead was a CCTV clip that the world could not look away from, a donkey that did its best, and a story that nobody, including the police who told it, could quite believe.