An Iranian man who lived in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years and whose story inspired Steven Spielberg’s film “The Terminal” died Saturday in the airport he called home for so long, according to officials.
According to an official with the Paris airport authorities, Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of a heart attack about noon in Terminal 2F of the airport. He was treated by police and medical personnel, but they were unable to save him, according to the official. The official was not permitted to be identified publicly.
From 1988 to 2006, Nasseri resided in Terminal 1 of the airport, initially in legal limbo because he lacked residency documents and then by apparent choice.
Year after year, he slept on a red plastic bench, making friends with airport employees, showering in staff facilities, keeping a journal, reading periodicals, and observing passing travelers.
FILE — Mehran Karimi Nasseri, originally from Iran, was seen at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on August 5, 2004. Eric Fougere / VIP Images / Corbis / Getty
The crew gave him the nickname Lord Alfred, and he became a minor celebrity among the passengers.
In 1999, while smoking a pipe on a seat and seeming sickly with long, thin hair, sunken eyes, and hollow cheeks, he told The Associated Press, “Eventually I will leave the airport.” However, I’m still awaiting my passport or transit visa.
In 1945, Nasseri was born to an Iranian father and a British mother in Soleiman, an area of Iran then under British control. In 1974, he left Iran to study in England. When he returned, he was arrested for defying the shah and deported without a passport, he said.
He applied for political asylum in multiple European nations. The UNHCR in Belgium issued him refugee credentials, but he reported that the certificate was stolen from his briefcase in a Paris railway station.
The French police later captured him, but they were unable to deport him since he lacked proper documents. He arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in August 1988 and remained.
Years of bureaucratic incompetence and more stringent European immigration restrictions put him in a legal limbo.
When he acquired his refugee papers, he recalled his amazement and apprehension about leaving the airport. Reportedly refusing to sign them, he remained there for several years until he was hospitalized in 2006, after which he resided in a Paris shelter.
According to those who knew him in the airport, the years he spent living in the windowless place affected his mental health. In the 1990s, the airport doctor was concerned about his physical and mental condition and referred to him as “fossilized here.” A friend who worked as a ticket agent characterized him to a prisoner incapable of “living outside.”
According to the airport officer, Nasseri had returned to Charles de Gaulle in the weeks preceding his murder.
Nasseri’s baffling story inspired the 2004 Tom Hanks film “The Terminal,” as well as the French film “Lost in Transit” and the opera “Flight.”
Hanks portrays Viktor Navorski in “The Terminal,” a guy who arrives at New York’s JFK airport from the imaginary Eastern European nation of Krakozhia and discovers that an overnight political revolution has rendered all of his travel documents invalid. Viktor is dropped in the international lounge of the airport and told he must remain there until his status is resolved, a process that drags on as the upheaval in Krakozhia persists.
There was no information immediately available regarding survival.