DUBAI: It’s been an eventful few days for Mohammad Basheer Abdul Khadar, an Indian living in Dubai.
In the space of a week, he survived a crash landing at Dubai airport then won $1 million in a lottery organized by the airport’s duty free operator, media reported.
The 62-year-old was flying home from holidays with family in India when the Boeing 777 in which he was traveling caught fire on landing with 300 people on board.
The accident on Thursday shut down the Middle East’s busiest airport for several hours, forcing authorities to cancel hundreds of flights. All the passengers and crew escaped unharmed, but a firefighter died tackling the blaze.
Just six days later, Khadar discovered that the lottery ticket he’d bought on the way to India was now worth $1 million.
A fleet administrator with a Dubai car dealership, Khadar told Gulf News he habitually bought a lottery ticket on his way to visit family in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
Ticket number 845 in the “Millenium Millionaire” draw at the airport’s Dubai Duty Free proved to be his winning shot.
“I live a simple life, and now that it’s my time to retire, I feel like God gave me a second life when I survived the plane crash, and blessed me with this money to follow all this up by doing good things,” he told the media.
Khadar has lived in Dubai for 37 years and is married with two children, one of whom is paralyzed after a fall early on in his childhood, reported the local media.
Khadar said he was planning to return to Kerala to retire and would use the money to help children in Kerala who need financial support.
He said he earns around $2,200 (2,000 euros) a month, and would continue to work as long as he could.
“Nothing else can give you the satisfaction of your hard-earned money,” he said.
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Dubai plane crash survivor, 62, hits $1 million jackpot
Dubai plane crash survivor, 62, hits $1 million jackpot
Palestinian NGO condemns Israeli act of ‘revenge’ after prisoner abuse video
- A Palestinian NGO has denounced what it called an Israeli act of revenge after a video showed far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir overseeing the abuse of detainees in a military priso
RAMALLAH: A Palestinian NGO has denounced what it called an Israeli act of revenge after a video showed far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir overseeing the abuse of detainees in a military prison.
Just days before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Ben Gvir held a tour of Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s Channel 7 reported.
In footage filmed on Friday and broadcast by the channel, around 20 police officers are seen storming a hallway leading to prison cells, brandishing their weapons and firing stun grenades.
They then pull five detainees from their cells, their hands tied behind their backs, forcing them face-down onto the floor.
The operation took place as a bill proposing the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorism awaited a final vote in the Israeli parliament.
“This is all part of ongoing displays meant to take revenge on Palestinian detainees,” Abdallah al?Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, told AFP on Saturday.
“Everything Ben Gvir and the far?right government are doing affects not only the Palestinian people and prisoners in detention camps — it also impacts the global legal and human rights system,” he added.
Ben Gvir, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, is considered one of the most hard-line members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
“It is simply a source of pride — arriving at a prison like this, a prison for terrorists, the vilest of the vile, seeing them like this,” Ben Gvir said in the video.
“I want one more thing: to execute them — the death penalty for terrorists,” he added.
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Saturday said the remarks were “a new war crime and a blatant challenge to international humanitarian law regarding prisoners.”
International rights groups have repeatedly warned of alleged abuse and mistreatment inflicted in Israeli prisons since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
While the death penalty exists for a small number of crimes in Israel, it has become a de facto abolitionist country, with the Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann the last person to be executed in 1962.
Just days before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Ben Gvir held a tour of Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s Channel 7 reported.
In footage filmed on Friday and broadcast by the channel, around 20 police officers are seen storming a hallway leading to prison cells, brandishing their weapons and firing stun grenades.
They then pull five detainees from their cells, their hands tied behind their backs, forcing them face-down onto the floor.
The operation took place as a bill proposing the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorism awaited a final vote in the Israeli parliament.
“This is all part of ongoing displays meant to take revenge on Palestinian detainees,” Abdallah al?Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, told AFP on Saturday.
“Everything Ben Gvir and the far?right government are doing affects not only the Palestinian people and prisoners in detention camps — it also impacts the global legal and human rights system,” he added.
Ben Gvir, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, is considered one of the most hard-line members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
“It is simply a source of pride — arriving at a prison like this, a prison for terrorists, the vilest of the vile, seeing them like this,” Ben Gvir said in the video.
“I want one more thing: to execute them — the death penalty for terrorists,” he added.
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Saturday said the remarks were “a new war crime and a blatant challenge to international humanitarian law regarding prisoners.”
International rights groups have repeatedly warned of alleged abuse and mistreatment inflicted in Israeli prisons since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
While the death penalty exists for a small number of crimes in Israel, it has become a de facto abolitionist country, with the Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann the last person to be executed in 1962.
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