An Iranian man who lived in Paris for 18 years and was the inspiration for the Steven Spielberg film "The Terminal" has died.
An official with the Paris airport authority said that Merhan was dead after a heart attack at the airport. The police and medical team were unable to save him. The official was not made public.
He lived in the airport's Terminal 1 from 1988 until 2006 because he lacked residency papers.
He slept on a red plastic bench for years, making friends with airport workers, showering in staff facilities, and writing in his diary.
He was nicknamed Lord Alfred by the staff.
He told The AP in 1999 that he would leave the airport eventually. I don't have a passport or transit visa.
In 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran that was under British jurisdiction, an Iranian father and a British mother gave birth to a child named Nasseri. He studied in England in 1974. He said he was thrown out of the country for protesting against the shah.
In Europe, he applied for political asylum. He said his briefcase with his refugee certificate was stolen while he was in Paris.
He couldn't be deported because he didn't have an official document. He stayed at Charles de Gaulle.
He was in a legal no-man's land for a long time because of bureaucratic bungling and strict European immigration laws.
He described his surprise when he got refugee papers. He lived in a Paris shelter after he was hospitalized in 2006 for refusing to sign them.
The years of living in the windowless space took a toll on his mental state, according to those who befriended him. The doctor at the airport was worried about his health in the 1990s. He was compared to a prisoner incapable of living on the outside.
The airport official said that in the weeks before his death, he had been living at Charles de Gaulle.
2004's "The Terminal" starring Tom Hanks, as well as a French film, "Lost in Transit," and an opera called "Flight" were all inspired by Nasseri's story.
Hanks plays a man who arrives at JFK airport in New York from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia and discovers that an overnight political revolution has invalidated all his travel papers. The unrest in Krakozhia drags on as Viktor is told to stay at the airport until his status is sorted out.
There was no information about survivors at the time.
That's right.
A contribution was made by the person in Paris.
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