Hunt for million dollar mattress
13 hours ago
An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress she said had almost one million US dollars inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of rubbish at a number of landfill sites.
The woman said she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise present - and threw out the old one.
The next day, she said, she remembered that she had hidden her life savings inside the old mattress.
"I woke up in the morning screaming, when it hit me what happened," said the woman, from Tel Aviv, who asked not to be identified.
She went to look for the mattress, but it had already been hauled away by rubbish collectors, she said. Subsequent searches at three different landfill sites turned up nothing.
She said the money was in US dollars and Israeli shekels. She refused to say how she acquired such a large sum. "It was all my money in the world," she said.
The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot published a picture of the woman searching through rubbish at a dump in southern Israel. The picture shows the woman, dressed in a white top and black trousers with her back to the camera, picking through a huge pile of rubbish which fills the frame about 10 feet in all directions.
Yitzhak Borba, the dump manager, told Army Radio that his staff were helping the woman, saying she appeared "totally desperate." He said he increased security at the site to keep would-be treasure hunters away.
The woman said the money had been stashed in a mattress because she had had "traumatic experiences with banks" in the past. She would not elaborate.
She said she was trying to remain hopeful the money would be recovered, but she feared someone may already have found it. Even so, she said it could be worse. "People have to take everything in proportion, and thank God for the good and the bad," she said.
Copyright © 2009 The Press Association. All rights reserved.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpres ... oFlqd_bdKQ
