December 16, 2022
The Iranian man who lived 18 years in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and whose saga inspired the Steven Spielberg film “The Terminal” has died in the airport that he long called home. He was 76.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri died November 12 after a heart attack in the airport’s Terminal 2F around midday, according to an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team treated him but were not able to save him.
Nasseri lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 until 2006, first in legal limbo because he lacked residency papers and later apparently by choice.
He slept on a red plastic bench surrounded by boxes of newspapers and magazines and showered in staff facilities. He spent his time writing in his diary, reading magazines, studying economics and surveying passing travelers.
Staff nicknamed him Lord Alfred, and he became a mini-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 in Masjed-e Soleyman in Khuzestan province to an Iranian father, a physician working for the oil company, and a British mother, who was a nurse with the oil company. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. When he returned, he said, he was imprisoned for protesting against the Shah and expelled without a passport.
He applied for political asylum in several countries in Europe, including the UK, but was rejected. Eventually, the UN refugee agency in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen at a Paris train station.
French police later arrested him, but couldn’t deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. He ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988, where he stayed.
Further bureaucratic bungling and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in a legal no-man’s land for years.
Karimi Nasseri’s peculiar story came to the attention of Hollywood director Spielberg, inspiring the 2004 film “The Terminal,” which starred Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Hanks played a man who becomes trapped at New York’s JFK airport when his mythical home country collapses in revolution.
Karimi Nasseri was paid $250,000 by Spielberg for the rights to use his story, although eventually Spielberg based the film on a character like Karimi Nasseri but not on Karimi Nasseri himself. After spending most of the money he received for the film, Karimi Nasseri returned to the airport a few weeks ago, news reports said, though there was no explanation for the reason he did so.
Several thousand euros were found on him after his death.
At Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport an informal support network had grown up around him, providing food and medical help along with books and a radio.
In 1999 he was granted refugee status and the right to remain in France.
“I’m not quite sure what I want to do, stay at Roissy or leave,” he said after being handed the right to live in France. “I have papers, I can stay here, I think I should carefully study all the options before making a decision.”
He didn’t leave then.
“He no longer wants to leave the airport,” his lawyer Christian Bourguet said at the time. “He’s scared of going.” Eventually, in July 2006, he left, spending most of his successive years in government shelters.
There has been considerable dispute over his story. Nasseri alleged he was expelled from Iran in 1977 for protests against the Shah. However, this claim was disputed, with one investigation concluding Nasseri was never expelled from Iran.
Having a British mother, he decided in 1986 to settle in the UK, but en route there in 1988, he said his papers were lost when his briefcase was stolen. Others said Nasseri actually mailed his documents to Brussels while onboard a ferry to Britain, lying about them being stolen.
His case was later taken on by French human rights lawyer Christian Bourget. In 1992, a French court ruled that having entered the country legally, he could not be expelled from the airport, but it could not grant him permission to enter France.
Attempts were then made to have new documents issued from Belgium, but the authorities there would do so only if Karimi Nasseri presented himself in person. In 1995, the Belgian authorities granted permission for him to travel to Belgium, but only if he agreed to live there under the supervision of a social worker. Nasseri refused this on the grounds of wanting to enter the UK as originally intended.
Both France and Belgium offered Nasseri residency, but he refused to sign the papers as they listed him as being Iranian rather than British and did not show his preferred name, “Sir Alfred Mehran.”
When contacted about Karimi Nasseri’s situation, his family said it believed he was living the life he wanted.
