International: Man finally wins lottery claim from washed-up ticket
A Spaniard has won a six-year court battle to claim the equivalent of about $50,000 US from a winning lottery ticket that went through a washing machine and came out in pieces.
The organization running the lottery, the National Organization of Blind Spaniards, had refused to pay out on grounds the pieces might stem from a scam - a bunch of tickets washed intentionally and then snippets put together to look like a ticket with the winning five-digit number.
But a Madrid court ruled Thursday that plaintiff Miguel Carnerero, who bought the ticket in a bar in 1999 in the Basque city of Vitoria, had not done anything dodgy.
It said microscopic analysis of the edges of the pieces he presented showed they matched up perfectly and it would be "almost impossible" for them to have come from different tickets.