A man who lived for 18 years in Paris' Charles de Gaulle Airport and whose saga inspired Steven Spielberg's movie ‘The Terminal’ has died in the airport he once called home.
According to an official with the Paris airport authority, Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of a heart attack in Terminal 2F around midday on Saturday. A medical team and police attempted to save him, but were unable to do so.
From 1988 until 2006, Nasseri lived in Terminal 1 of the airport, first in legal limbo due to a lack of residency papers and later by choice. Throughout his life, he slept on a red plastic bench, made friends with airport staff, took showers in staff facilities, kept a diary, read magazines and watched travellers pass by.
As the son of an Iranian father and a British mother, Nasseri was born in 1945 in the soleiman region of Iran, which was under British jurisdiction at the time. He left Iran to study in England in 1974. In response to his protests against the shah, he was imprisoned and expelled without a passport.
He applied for political asylum in several countries in Europe. The UNHCR in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen in a Paris train station. He was later arrested by French police, but he was unable to be deported since he lacked official documents. He ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988 and stayed.