Guy Survives Plane Crash, Wins $1M Days Later

Last Wednesday, Mohammad Basheer Abdul Khadar was scrambling out of a plane that had crash-landed in the United Arab Emirates. Six days later, he was jumping for joy, $1 million richer. Days before the Emirates crash, which left 13 people injured, the 62-year-old Indian national living in Dubai had bought his usual ticket for the Dubai Duty Free Millennium Millionaire raffle while at the Dubai airport en route to Thiruvananthapuram in the Indian state of Kerala for a family vacation, reports the Gulf News. While his return flight proved luckless, his winning raffle ticket—pulled in the $1 million prize draw on Tuesday—has helped earn him the title of the "world's luckiest man," per the Telegraph.

Emirates officials still aren't clear on what caused the crash, per CNN, but "I knew God saved me for some specific purpose. Probably this is it," Khadar says. "I feel like God gave me a second life ... and blessed me with this money to follow all this up by doing good things." Khadar—who supports his 21-year-old son, who is paralyzed—says he'll follow through with his earlier plan to retire from his job at a car dealership in December, then return to India to "help the children in Kerala who are less fortunate." "I want to go out and find people who really need help and give them money," he says. "I was poor, and I know what people go through." (Let's hope he doesn't change his mind and spend his money like this guy.)