Hoping to start 2013 with the win of a lifetime, a 76-year-old man got stuck in an underground paper-recycling container in Amsterdam yesterday while searching desperately for a lottery ticket he believed would make him rich.
The elderly man, who has not been named, brought his used paper and cardboard to the municipal recycling facility not far from his home near Cornelis Troost Square in the south of the city in the morning – but when he returned home noticed his lottery ticket was missing.
Believing the ticket gave him a chance of winning or at least sharing the Netherlands’ €30 million new year’s state lottery jackpot, the most valuable of the year, he returned to the recycling bins – and attempted to climb into the large underground metal container hoping to find the ticket.
Police say that instead of retrieving his dream, the man got hopelessly stuck in the opening and had become quite distressed by the time local people heard his calls for help and realised what had happened.
Neighbours tried to free him but he was so comprehensively wedged into the small opening that they had to call the emergency services to avoid injuring him. He was subsequently taken to hospital for a check-up.
“It was very sad, but elderly people are even more worried than the rest of us about money these days,” said a neighbour.
“He was absolutely convinced he had thrown it out and now he’ll never know. That’s the worst thing.”
Police confirmed last night that no ticket was found and said there was no way of knowing if it had ever been there or if it had been a winning ticket. They said the important thing was that the man had not been injured.
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