Christmas came early for a French homeless man at Paris’s main airport when he found an unlocked door at the offices of a cash handling company … and walked away €300,000 ($350,000) richer.
The man was rummaging through bins at Charles de Gaulle airport northeast of Paris last Friday when he checked a door at the Loomis cash management company and found it had been left open.
Authorities have pored over surveillance footage that captured the incident, according to Le Parisien newspaper, which was the first to report the story on Wednesday. He pushes on the door … and appears surprised when it opens, the French daily recounted. Then the homeless man sets his suitcase down and enters the company’s offices.
A picture taken on June 21, 2012 at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport, in Roissy-en-France, northern Paris, shows the then-new boarding hall of Terminal 2E S4.
The door led to a compartment containing two bags filled with money. An investigator, confirming Le Parisien’s story, called it the perfect crime and said police still don’t know why the door was open at the time.
At first we thought it had to be a setup, but it looks like it was just luck. It’s incredible, a police source told Agence France-Presse, asking not to be identified by name.
Investigators are searching for the suspect, who is believed to be in his fifties and has been identified by airport police.