Selman Aksunger
28 July 2022•Update: 28 July 2022
AMSTERDAM
Armed with only her dusting cloth and iron will, a woman in the Netherlands faced down an armed robber who burst into a bakery, intent on clearing out the cash register. Instead, he was the one who was cleared out, and quickly.
In a security camera video that went viral Thursday, Latife Peker, 47, can be seen cleaning up around the bakery’s display case when a robber, lurking at the door, suddenly storms in, brandishing a meat cleaver, ready to rob the establishment.
At first Peker, shocked, backs off strategically, but when the black-clad robber tries his luck with the cash register, Peker, who was tending the bakery for her son, moves in for an all-out assault.
She beats the crook repeatedly with her trusty cleaning cloth, perhaps hoping to daze him with a faceful of dust and cleanser scent.
Moving into close quarters, she and the would-be thief then wrestle it out, with Peker seemingly holding her own against the taller and evidently younger criminal.
When a customer walks in during their struggle, unawares, the thief – facing a possible beatdown from two directions – gives up the ghost and quickly flees, trying to punch the male customer on his way out.
The whole life-or-death encounter lasts less than 20 seconds.
From there the thief reportedly beat a hasty retreat by bike, painfully aware that he had chosen the wrong bakery to rob, with his plans for easy money foiled by a fierce defender.
Speaking to local media, Peker, a mother of three with Turkish roots, said that she has not realized the thief was carrying a cleaver and never stopped to consider losing her life in the struggle with the thief.
An English proverb says “A man’s home is his castle,” but in one Dutch bakery, a crook found out in short order that a woman’s workplace can also be a well-defended fortress.
