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An Iranian man who made Paris’s main Charles de Gaulle airport his home for 18 years and inspired the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal died Saturday, officials said. Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of a heart attack in Terminal 2F of the airport around noon, according to the Associated Press citing an official with the Paris airport authority. Naseri was loosely inspired by Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal which stars Hanks as Viktor Navorsky — an Eastern European stuck in the terminal at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport after being denied entry to the United States while unable to return home of due to a military coup. Steven Spielberg’s production company Dreamworks reportedly paid Naseri $250,000 (£2,11,193) for the rights to his story. A medical team treated Nasseri but was unable to revive him. Nasseri lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 to 2006, initially in a legal vacuum because he had no residency papers and later by apparent choice. He slept on a red plastic bench, befriended airport workers, showered in staff facilities, wrote in his diary, read magazines and surveyed passing travelers. The staff nicknamed him Lord Alfred and he became a mini-celebrity among the passengers. “Eventually, I’ll 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’m still waiting for a passport or a transit visa.” He was born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran then under British jurisdiction. He applied for political asylum in several European countries. UNHCR in Belgium gave him refugee credentials, but said his briefcase containing the refugee certificate was stolen at a Paris train station. French police later arrested him but could not deport him anywhere because he had no official documents. It ended up at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988 and stayed. Further red tape and increasingly strict European immigration laws kept him in legal land for years. When he finally received his refugee papers, he described his surprise and insecurity about leaving the airport. He reportedly refused to sign them and ended up staying there for several more years until he was hospitalized in 2006 and later lived in a shelter in Paris. In the weeks before his death, Nasseri was living again at Charles de Gaulle, the airport official said. (With additional information from agencies)
