Iranian who inspired The Terminal dies at Paris airport
PARIS: An Iranian man who lived for 18 years in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport and whose saga loosely inspired the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal died on Saturday in the airport that he long called home, officials said.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri died after a heart attack in the airport’s Terminal 2F around midday, according an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team treated him but were not able to save him, an official said.
Nasseri lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 until 2006, first in legal limbo because he lacked residency papers and later by apparent choice. “Eventually, I will leave the airport,” he told The Associated Press in 1999. “But I am still waiting for a passport or transit visa.”
Nasseri was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction, to an Iranian father and a British mother. 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.
The UNHCR in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but he said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen in 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 and stayed there until he was hospitalised in 2006. He later lived in a Paris shelter.
Those who befriended him in the airport said the years of living in the windowless space took a toll on his mental state. The airport doctor in the 1990s worried about his physical and mental health, and described him as “fossilised here”.
A ticket agent friend compared him to a prisoner incapable of “living on the outside”.
In the weeks before his death, Nasseri had been again living at Charles de Gaulle, the airport official said.