An Iranian man who lived for 18 years at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and whose story was loosely based on Steven Spielberg’s film The Terminal has died, according to officials.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of a heart attack in the airport’s Terminal 2F around midday, according to a Paris airport authority official. According to the official, police and a medical team treated him but were unable to save him. The official was not authorized to be publicly named.
Nasseri lived in Terminal 1 of the airport from 1988 to 2006, first in legal limbo due to a lack of residency papers and later by apparent choice.
He slept on a red plastic bench year after year, making friends with airport workers, showering in staff facilities, writing in his diary, reading magazines, and surveying passing passengers.
Staff dubbed him Lord Alfred, and he became something of a celebrity among passengers.
“Eventually, I will leave the airport,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, smoking a pipe on his bench, looking frail with long thin hair, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. “But I am still waiting for a passport or transit visa.”
Nasseri was born in 1945 to an Iranian father and a British mother in Soleiman, a region of Iran then under British control. In 1974, he left Iran to study in England. He claimed that when he returned, he was imprisoned for protesting the Shah and expelled without a passport.
He sought political asylum in several European countries. The UNHCR granted him refugee credentials in Belgium, but he claimed his briefcase containing the certificate was stolen in a Paris train station.
Later, French police arrested him but were unable to deport him because he lacked official documents. In August 1988, he arrived at Charles de Gaulle and stayed.
Further bungling by the bureaucracy and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in a legal limbo for years.
He described his surprise and anxiety about leaving the airport when he finally received refugee papers. He allegedly refused to sign them and ended up staying there for several years until he was hospitalized in 2006 and later lived in a Paris shelter.
Those who befriended him in the airport said his mental state suffered as a result of years of living in the windowless space. In the 1990s, the airport doctor was concerned about his physical and mental health and described him as “fossilised here.” A ticket agent friend likened him to a prisoner who is unable to “live on the outside.”
Nasseri’s mind-boggling story inspired 2004’s The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks, as well as Lost in Transit, a French film, and Flight, an opera.
Hanks plays Viktor Navorski in The Terminal, a man who arrives at JFK airport in New York from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia and discovers that an overnight political revolution has rendered all of his travel documents invalid. Viktor is thrown into the airport’s international lounge and told he must stay there until his status is resolved, which takes time as the unrest in Krakozhia continues.
