The Iranian refugee who lived in a Paris airport
Mehran Karimi Nasseri 1945–2022
Mehran Karimi Nasseri experienced history’s longest layover. The Iranian refugee earned international fame for spending 18 years—from 1988 to 2006—living in Terminal 1 of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, first because of immigration limbo but later out of choice. Nasseri, who’d traveled around Europe after being exiled from Iran, landed in the airport when he was turned back from London for lack of identity papers, which he said had been stolen. Allowed neither to get on a plane nor to enter France, the soft-spoken eccentric remained in the airport, where he slept on a bench and ate donated food. His tale inspired the 2004 Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, in which Tom Hanks plays a refugee stuck at New York’s JFK Airport after a military coup in his homeland. “I realize I am famous,” Nasseri said in 1999. “I wasn’t interesting until I came here.”
Nasseri’s biographical details shifted in his own telling, but according to his early accounts, he was born in southern Iran, where his father was a doctor, said The Guardian. While studying in Britain, he protested against the Shah, and was “stripped of his passport when he returned” home. While Belgium granted him refugee status in 1981, Nasseri spent years trying to get back to the U.K., claiming his real mother was Scottish, not Iranian, and calling himself Sir Alfred Mehran. At De Gaulle he “became a peculiar fixture,” said The New York Times, living on a red plastic bench surrounded by his possessions and a collection of press clippings. Subsisting off meal coupons donated by airport workers, he spent his days reading books and newspapers. Offered French residency in 1999, he opted to stay put. “He is scared to leave this bubble world he has been living in,” said Philippe Bargain, the airport’s medical director. “Finally getting the papers has been a huge shock.”
Once he did leave, Nasseri “appeared to struggle to adapt to outside life,” said The Washington Post. He spent some time in a hotel with the money he’d been paid for the film rights to his story, but later lived in a homeless shelter. In his final days, he returned to the airport, and he was in Terminal 2 when he died of a heart attack. “Everyone has their own function,” he told an interviewer in 2003. “I am sitting here, waiting.”