Majlis Diego (center) and his two friends show off their missing World Cup tickets they retrieved at the Pudong International Airport yesterday. Diego lost the tickets when he arrived at the airport on June 8.

Three Argentine merchants yesterday retrieved their missing World Cup tickets that one of them left at an airport bank last week.

That enabled them to attend today's game in Germany between their country and Serbia and Montenegro.

The Shanghai Daily and another local newspaper, Xinmin Evening News, had published stories on Wednesday, reporting the valuable tickets found at a bank at the Pudong International Airport.

The man who left the tickets behind, Majlis Diego, showed up at the airport with his two Argentine friends yesterday morning, after his Chinese friends in Yiwu, neighboring Zhejiang Province, read news of the missing tickets in the Xinmin newspaper and informed them their tickets were still at the airport.

The three Argentine merchants were in China for a business trip in Yiwu.

They had planned to fly from Shanghai yesterday to Germany to watch the Friday match and cheer for their national soccer team.

While Diego's two friends arrived in Shanghai earlier than him and went to Yiwu, Diego landed in the city by Lufthansa airline on June 8.

Diego left a briefcase at a counter during a money check at the airport bank.

The briefcase contained two World Cup tickets for his two friends as well as an envelope with about 2,000 euros (US$2,526) inside.

The World Cup tickets had the names of the spectators. Diego didn't lose his own ticket in the incident, however.

Diego said his two Argentine friends almost "wanted to kill him" when learning of the missing tickets, while feeling sorry for his property loss.

Diego and his friends had reported to the local Customs of the loss immediately as well as alerting police in Yiwu.

Diego received his property and his friends' tickets from the bank officials at the airport early yesterday morning.

They left by a 10am flight to Germany yesterday. The game was to start at 3pm, German local time, in Gelsenkirchen.

"Thank you. I love Shanghai now," Diego said to the port police officers when checking out with his happy friends.

(Shanghai Daily June 16, 2006)