Pushchairs, funeral ashes and false teeth: Lost and found at Alicante-Elche airport

APPROXIMATELY 6,400 mislaid items found at Alicante-Elche airport lost and found last year are waiting to be reunited with their owners.

Two Local Police officers deal with lost property, first checking each item to see if its owner can be identified. These are then labelled and entered on a computer so that they can easily be located if reclaimed.

Probably only 20 per cent of the items in the airport’s four storerooms will be reclaimed, although cuddly toys are amongst the most frequently-retrieved objects the police officers said.

Hundreds of belts and pairs of spectacles forgotten after passing through the metal detectors reach the lost property office where the shelves are full of phones, tablets and laptops. Pushchairs, false teeth, hearing aids and an electric oven have also been found, together with an undertaker’s urn containing a loved one’s ashes.

The 2014 items will be kept for two years, after which those found by airport staff are sent to a charity. Anything handed in by the public becomes their property two years later.

This includes cash and it is only a couple of weeks since a delighted man walked out of the airport with €12,000 that he found and took to the lost property office two years ago.