Merhan Karimi Nasseri lived 18 years at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and was the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s film Station. Officials said he died Saturday at the airport.
Michel Euler / AP
hide captions
switch captions
Michel Euler / AP
Merhan Karimi Nasseri lived 18 years at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and was the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s film Station. Officials said he died Saturday at the airport.
Michel Euler / AP
PARIS – An Iranian man who lived for 18 years at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and whose story is loosely inspiring Steven Spielberg’s film “The Terminal” Officials said he died Saturday at the airport he has long called home.
Merhan Karimi Nasseri died of a heart attack in the airport’s terminal 2 around midday, according to an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team treated him but were unable to save him, the official said. The official was not authorized to make his name public.
Nasseri lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 to 2006, first in legal limbo because of a lack of residency documents and then by obvious choice.
Year after year, he sleeps on a red plastic couch, befriends airport staff, showers in the staff room, writes in his diary, reads magazines and surveys passersby. .
Staff nicknamed him Lord Alfred, and he became a minor celebrity among the passengers.
“Ultimately, I’m leaving the airport,” he told The Associated Press in 1999, smoking a pipe on his bench, looking frail with long thin hair, sunken eyes and sunken cheeks. “But I’m still waiting for my passport or transit visa.”
Immigration laws and bureaucracy leave him in legal limbo
Nasseri was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction, to an Iranian father and British mother. He left Iran to study in the UK in 1974. When he returned, he said, he had been jailed for protesting hypocrisy and deported without a passport.
He has applied for political asylum in several countries in Europe. UNHCR in Belgium issued him with an asylum certificate, but he said his briefcase containing the asylum certificate was stolen in a Paris train station.
French police later arrested him, but were unable to deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. He ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988 and stayed.
Further bureaucratic mayhem and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in a legal no-man’s land for years.
When he finally received his asylum papers, he described his surprise and insecurity as he left the airport. He allegedly refused to sign them, and ended up staying there for a few more years until being hospitalized in 2006, and then living in a Paris shelter.
Those who befriend him in the airport say years of living in windowless space have greatly affected his mental state. The airport doctor in the 1990s was concerned about his physical and mental health, and described him as “fossilized here.” A ticket agent friend compares him to a prisoner who cannot afford to “live outside”.
In the weeks before his death, Nasseri was once again living at Charles de Gaulle, airport officials said.
Nasseri’s mind-bending story inspired the 2004 film “The Terminal” starring Tom Hanks, as well as a French film “Lost in Transit” and an opera called “Flight”.
In “The Terminal,” Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a man who arrives at New York’s JFK airport from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia and discovers that an overnight political revolution has devalued all his travel documents. Viktor was ushered into the airport’s international lounge and told he had to stay there until his condition was resolved, which led to the unrest in Krakozhia continuing.
No information is immediately available about survivors.
