Pilsen garbage collector finds half a million euros, hands it in

Martin Templ, a 34-year-old garbage collector from Pilsen, found a knee-brace pouch stuffed with a wad of euros in a discarded bag — according to the original headline, about half a million — and handed it in to the police the next day. The money belonged to a man who had died, and it will now go back to his family.

It all happened last week. The crew of a garbage truck — Templ, his colleague Josef Špilar and driver Jan Šašek — was making its usual rounds of the city. In the centre, on Prague Street, an old bag lay next to one of the containers, no longer fitting inside. Špilar decided it would come in handy for fishing, and the bag was taken into the cab.

They only dared to look inside at the waste incineration plant. There they found old clothes and a knee-brace pouch packed with euro banknotes, as well as two payment cards and Ukrainian documents written in Cyrillic. “I actually felt sick. I was completely stunned,” Templ said in an interview. Everyone’s first thought was the same: keep the money and split it. Martin took the pouch home, deciding to wait and see what happened.

He did not sleep all night, turning the options over in his head. What if someone had left the money in the bag by mistake, had written down the serial numbers and would start looking for it? “I wouldn’t want the Ukrainian mafia on my neck as well,” he admitted.

Police surprised by his honesty

In the end the colleagues decided to report the find. The next day the crew met a police patrol, and Templ ran over to ask what to do with it. The officers, he says, shook their heads in disbelief, took him to the station and recorded his statement.

There an unexpected detail emerged: the owner of the money had died two weeks earlier. Had the garbage collector said nothing, no one would ever have known. “I won’t lie, at that moment it stung a little,” Templ recalls.

According to police, as relayed by spokeswoman Dagmar Mifková, the money belonged to a 57-year-old man who had died shortly before. His daughters threw out a plastic pouch of money while cleaning the flat and sorting his belongings — they apparently simply did not notice it. The women will now get the money back through the inheritance proceedings.

The finder himself now sleeps soundly: “I don’t have to worry that someone will come looking for me.” In addition, police say he is entitled to a reward, which may be as much as ten percent of the value of the find.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz