Friday 26 / April / 2024
Muscat: When Natasha Malik decided to take a walk down the Love Street last Sunday at 7:30pm to unwind after a stressful day, little did she know that all her inner calm would go out of the window -literally.
“I returned to the car after 45 minutes to find the passenger window shattered. When I couldn’t find my wallet, of course, the panic set in,” Malik said.
The car had been parked under the street lights and, as always, the street was bustling with people.
According to Malik, she had left her wallet out in plain sight along with other bags on the passenger seat.
“Please don’t leave your things in the car. I am very careless and I learnt the hard way. I hope no one else has to learn that way,” she now offers some sane advice.
Personnel from the ROP, CID and Crime Scene Unit were called, and procedures continued till around 11pm.
Fingerprints were taken and she was asked to wait for 48 hours before applying for new cards. The wallet had her resident card, driver’s licence, bank cards, and some other stuff. Luckily for her, there was just OMR10 in cash. The ROP informed her that thieves usually take the money and discard the wallet, which is exactly what happened next.
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“As soon as I reached my work place, somebody called me asking if I was Natasha. They informed me that they found my wallet washed up on the shore. I couldn’t have been more excited,” she said.
Eventful walk
Good Samaritan Kristy Palmer and her husband were out for a morning stroll by the beach when they stumbled across the soaked wallet. “There, next to a metre-long squid was the wallet lying. It turned out to be a fairly eventful walk,” Palmer said.
According to Palmer, there was no actual contact information in the wallet and it took them about five attempts to finally reach Malik. “We originally planned to hand it over to the ROP but then thought it would reach the rightful person quickly if we tried to trace the owner. I tried looking up her name but couldn’t find a Facebook account, but she did have a twitter account. One of her health insurance cards had her employers’ name on it, so we called them and they gave us her work number,” Palmer said.
Palmer took time out of her day to track down Malik, because she believes positivity is reciprocal. “You can add something positive anytime to somebody else’s day, it’s not only a positive for them but it’s a positive for you as well.”
“We feel very safe in Oman and because of that, we sometimes let our guard down. It’s really important that we keep our valuables out of sight,” Palmer added.
