Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian citizen who lived at the Paris airport for 18 years, has died. Karimi had been using the airport as his home for the past 18 years, unable to return to Natty. Caught in diplomatic limbo, Mehran Roissy made a small part of the Charles de Gaulle airport his home.
In 2004, a movie about Mehran’s life was also born. The life of Mehran Karimi Naseri inspired the Tom Hanks starrer ‘Terminal’. After the release of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, Nasseri gave up to six interviews a day. He was granted refugee status and the right to remain in France in 1999, but stayed at the airport until he fell ill in 2006 and was taken to hospital for treatment.
Naseri returned to the airport a few weeks ago and stayed there until his death, an airport official said. Born in 1945 in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, Naseri came to Europe in search of his mother. He has also been deported from countries such as the UK, the Netherlands and Germany due to problems with his immigration records. Lived in Belgium for a few years. He then went to France and made the airport’s Terminal Two F his home.
Naseri lived there by reading books and newspapers and writing about his life in a notebook. There are also reports that thousands of Euros were found with Naseri after his death. Naseri was born in 1945 in Sulaiman, then part of Iran, to an Iranian father and a British mother. He left Iran in 1974 to study in England. On his return he was jailed for protesting against the Shah and expelled without a passport.