Years of scrounging on the streets of Shahr-e Kord in western Iran meant that Talat Habibian was never anything more than a local beggar to his neighbors.

So when he was found dead in his squalid home, no one suspected that the disheveled tramp who spent his life pleading for money and favors was a real-life slumdog millionaire who left behind a vast fortune.

Police discovered a treasure trove when they searched through his possessions, finding more than US$10,000 in cash, ownership documents to a host of lucrative properties and businesses and title deeds to hectares of fertile farmland.

They also discovered an array of precious jewelry and ornaments, including earrings dating back to the mid-19th century reign of the Qajar king, Mohammad Shah. Officials say the value of the assets totals several billion Iranian rials — millions of US dollars.

A judge, Yousef Bagheri, has been appointed to dispose of them after it was confirmed that Habibian — whose age has been given variously as 70 or 75 — had no apparent heirs or next of kin.

Habibian is not Iran’s first wealthy beggar. In 2003, a 40-year-old Tehran woman filed for divorce after discovering that her husband, a wealthy carpet trader, regularly begged in a rundown neighborhood. He said he had a compulsive urge stemming from his upbringing in which he fell under the spell of organized beggars.

And three years ago, a beggar arrested in Tehran was found to have US$15,000 in the bank and to own a luxury flat in the affluent northern suburbs.

The Iranian authorities have taken steps periodically to stamp out begging. In 2006, Tehran city council offered monthly inducements of US$500 for adults and US$200 for children to give up the practice. 

The government venture failed because the beggars said that the incentives were less than what they could earn from begging on the streets.
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