Modern-day Samaritan? Iraqi man returns $160,000 bag of cash

Sometimes walking down the street we are confronted with the sight of small amounts of money (a fiver, a tenner, even $20 sometimes) lying, a bit out of place, a bit lonely, on the floor, or dancing a merry jig in a gust of wind.

In these moments we are confronted with choices. If the owner of the money is witnessed in the act of losing it, we are provided with the moral dilemma of pocketing the cash or returning it to its rightful owner.

If the owner of the cash is not witnessed in the act of losing it, the moral dilemma arguably is heightened even more, the temptation to pocket it even greater.

A man in the city of Sulaymaniyah, in Iraq's Kurdistan region was presented with just such a dilemma this week during a browse around a local store, according to local media. But this was no loose-change scenario, rather a bag containing $160,000 in cash.

Masoud Sulaiman, 31, took the morally upright, and arguably sensible option (we are not speaking about loose change here, but money that suggests its owner probably has some power, influence and resources to chase such money down if it had been stolen).

Rather than skip home jubilantly with a bag fit for a gangster and throw a party, Sulaiman instead took the bag and decided that given the enormity of the sum of money within, he had to do the right thing.

“I found a huge amount of cash and pretended that it [was] actually mine,” said Sulaiman in comment to BasNews, adding that he later contacted friends on Facebook to relay his discovery, and consequently attempting to find the rightful owner.

“Many people called me afterwards, but none of them gave the right information about an ID card that I found in the bag,” Sulaiman stated, having posted about his discovery on the popular social media forum.

Eventually the rightful owner of the bag contacted Suleiman and provided correct information about the amount of cash within, and the ID card and the money was returned with little scandal.

Sulaiman was able to return home a moral victor, a modern day good Samaritan, albeit perhaps dreaming of alternate realities involving Vuban cigars, Vibrequin swimming trunks, and vacations in the Bahamas.