Austrian Police Stupefied Over 100,000 Euros Found In Danube

It's not every day that you find cold, hard cash floating around in a river.

On Saturday morning, two young men came across about 100,000 euros ($108,000) in banknotes floating down the Danube River in Vienna. 

Police spokesman Patrick Maierhofer told The WorldPost Monday that police had learned about the development after several people had called authorities to report they saw large amounts of money floating in the Danube. 

The two men, however, did not alert the police when they found the money. They had dived into the water to fish some of the banknotes out of the river before police arrived and retrieved the rest of the money, police spokesman Roman Hahslinger told the BBC Monday. 

As of Monday, Austrian police remain stupefied as to how or why the the money ended up in the Danube. They suspect the money came from a crime, and "don't think someone just put it in the Danube" due to the sheer amount of money involved, Maierhofer said.

While they have not found any links to crimes involving this amount of money, special investigative forces are looking into the issue and hope to find answers within the next few days, the spokesman added.

According to Austrian law, people who find over 2,000 euros ($2,170) and bring it to the police's attention can get 5 percent of the total sum, provided the money was not obtained criminally. 

The fact that bystanders alerted the police around the same time the two men found the banknotes brings up the issue of who found the money first -- and who gets the share of the money if the police deem the money clean.

But police aren't concerned about that yet. "We have to wait for what's going on there, then we can talk about the situation and what the two men get," Maierhofer said.

 

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