KUALA LUMPUR • A Malaysian man who lost his mobile phone later found a series of selfies and a video left on the phone apparently by an unusual thief: a macaque.

Sharing his experience in a Twitter post, Mr Zackrydz Rodzi, 20, said he had just woken up from a nap at his house last Saturday when he realised his phone was missing. He searched everywhere in the house but all that he could find was the phone case under the bed.

"If it was stolen by a thief, why would the thief leave the casing and take off with the phone?" he wrote in his Twitter thread.

He told the BBC later that he decided to call his phone again after his father had noticed a monkey outside their house on Sunday, and that was when he heard it ringing from the jungle a few steps beyond the back garden.

The muddied phone was found beneath a palm tree.

"I checked my phone's gallery and found out my phone was 'stolen' by a monkey," he tweeted.

In a video that has been retweeted more than 5,000 times, the monkey appeared to be staring down on the camera against the backdrop of green leaves. In some photos, it was seen to be trying to eat the phone.

Mr Zackrydz, who according to the BBC is a final-year computer science student from Batu Pahat in the southern state of Johor, said he suspected the monkey had entered the house from an open window in his brother's bedroom.

"This is not something that you see every century," he tweeted.

"I don't know since when the monkey has been living in my neighbourhood but... monkey, you've made my life miserable for two days."

Mr Zackrydz is apparently not the only victim the monkey had burgled from. Local media reported that the simian had previously stolen two other mobile phones in the neighbourhood.