Pakistani Hotel Cleaner Returns $50,000 Found in Room

Essa Khan, a hotel cleaner from Pakistan, returned $50,000 to a businessman who had left the money behind accidentally.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on July 16 2010

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Everyone would like to think they’d do the right thing if they came across a large sum of money. But Pakistani hotel cleaner Essa Khan proved his honesty in a dramatic fashion: he handed over $50,000 cash that had been left in a hotel room by a Japanese visitor.

While $50,000 is a lot of money by anyone’s standards, it’s a fortune in Khan’s country: he earns a mere $235 a month.

Khan claims that he never felt the temptation to keep the money for himself.

“Times are hard for everyone, but that doesn’t mean we should start stealing and taking things which do not belong to us,” he told BBC News.

Khan hopes that his actions will help to show the rest of the world that Pakistanis and people of Muslim faith are not the villains that they’re too often portrayed as in the Western media.

“I want people around the world to know that there are many good people in Pakistan - everybody is not a terrorist here.”

Filed under: General Interest,

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