Man In Turkey Charged With Stealing Old Bridge Built In 1936

Legal illustration. (Pexels/Ekaterina Bolovtsova)

JAKARTA - Stealing entire bridges is no easy feat, but getting away with small pieces of primitive bridge parts is no big deal for thieves.

A suspect in the Turkish capital, Ankara, proved you can eliminate an entire bridge, or at least a trail, without attracting attention.

Although he managed to slowly dismantle the bridge into small pieces, the perpetrator with the initials ZK, a junk collector, was finally caught by the security forces.

The bizarre theft, however, is not unusual for a country where thieves once stole a 20-ton mobile bridge when it was moved for rehabilitation work from its original location over an overflowing river in the northwestern province of Kocaeli in 2013.

The stolen Gömleksiz Bridge is located on the Kirmir Stream in Beypazarı and was built in 1936, quoted from Daily Sabah January 18th. The bridge fell out of use more than four decades ago when a new, better bridge was built after the old one was damaged in a flood.

According to Yenisafak, the bridge, which is about 500 meters long and is used by drivers for traffic between Ankara and Beypazar, was badly damaged by the floods that occurred in 1978.

While some parts of the bridge collapsed, deep cracks formed in some parts. In the same year, when the new bridge was built and put into operation, the old bridge was left unused.

However, it was mostly intact until 10 days ago, when the suspect and a group of workers showed up. Unsuspecting locals thought they were officials tasked with destroying the bridge, whose walkway had already been partially dismantled.

ZK and others used bulldozers and trucks to dismantle the bridge, with the aim of selling the roughly 70 tonnes of iron found on the bridge. They left only the concrete foundation of the bridge.

Although local residents did not report the crime, which took about four days to commit, Gendarmerie troops patrolling the rarely used area spotted the theft a few days later and launched an investigation. Finally, ZK was arrested.

Media outlets reported that the suspect had previously applied to the authorities to collect metal parts from the unused bridge, but was denied.

The metal part of the bridge, worth about $36,000, or about 500,000 Turkish lira, was found disassembled in the suspect's junkyard in central Ankara.