The “Good Samaritan” who returned a lost Oyster card to Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall has told how delighted she was to be reunited with her free travel pass.
Retired businessman Ajiz Andani, told the Standard how he contacted Ms Hall after spotting a wallet containing her Freedom Pass and £40 in cash stuck between two seats on a Jubilee line train.
Shortly after the incident, on Monday afternoon, Ms Hall’s spokesman said she believed she had been pickpocketed on the Tube as she travelled home from Westminster to Pinner, first on the Jubilee line and then the Metropolitan line, which she switched on to at Finchley Road.
Ms Hall recalled a woman passenger bumping into her at Westminster and suspected this may have been linked to the loss of her travel wallet, which she only realised had gone missing when she tried to use her Freedom Pass to exit the station at Pinner.
Ms Hall said this highlighted the problem of rising crime on the London Underground – and her claim appeared to be vindicated on Wednesday when the Evening Standard revealed that Tube crime had soared 56 per cent in the last year, including an 83 per cent rise in thefts and pickpocketing.
But critics suspected the wallet containing Ms Hall’s Freedom Pass – which gives free travel to older Londoners after the morning rush-hour – may simply have fallen out of her "very, very deep" coat pocket, and subjected her to online ridicule.
It came as a London Assembly investigation into crime on the public transport network was told on Thursday by Siwan Hayward, Transport for London’s director of security, policing and enforcement, that the “vast majority of crimes are pickpocketing and people often don’t know exactly where they have been targeted”.
Mr Andani, 69, who was travelling north on the Jubilee line to Queensbury with his wife Shamshah at about 2pm on Monday, said they noticed the wallet when a male passenger stood up to leave the train at Kingsbury.
He said it appeared to have been dropped rather than having been in the possession of, or being concealed by, a thief.
Mr Andani said: “That person was ready to get out at Kingsbury. My wife saw that there was some wallet stuck between two seats. We asked him. He looked behind and said: ‘It’s not mine.’ We picked it up and found a Freedom Pass and some money inside.
“Luckily there was a business card with a phone number. We got out at Queensbury. I called Susan but she didn’t pick up, so I left a message. She didn’t call for a couple of hours so I called again. She picked up the phone. I told her that we had found this wallet.
“I said: 'I’m in Queensbury.' She said: 'I will come over.' When we handed it over to her she was so pleased. She was so happy. She said so many times, thank you very, very much. I feel she was very, very pleased. She was very humble as well.”
He said the man who had been sitting beside the wallet did not strike him as being a criminal.
“He was a sober guy,” Mr Andani said. “My thinking might be she dropped it and it was stuck in the middle of the seats. She told me she had got off [the Jubilee line] at Finchley Road. It might have been nobody was sitting there [where the wallet was] for a while. The train wasn’t crowded.”
He added: “Whatever you think, you think. My view was that it was not a pickpocketing. It might be that she lost it. The person who was sitting there was not looking like a pickpocket.”
He did not see a Tube station worker at Queensbury so took the wallet home to try to return the wallet to Ms Hall.
He had no idea that Ms Hall was the Tory mayoral candidate nor a member of the London Assembly as he and his wife had only moved to London last year from Peterborough.
He said: “There was some money inside it as well. I thought: ‘It’s not my property. I don’t want to take it.’
“If you are honest you go further. If you are not honest, you won’t get anything.”
Mr Andani said that his Freedom Pass had occasionally fallen from his pocket. “Normally I put it in a backpack. Sometimes I put it in my coat, in a side pocket, and it comes out.”
