AFP learned from a source at the airport that Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian political refugee who spent more than 18 years at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, died on Saturday.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri, also known as “Sir Alfred”, was born in 1945. He began living at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Roissy, north of Paris, in November 1988 after a series of wanderings in London, Berlin and Amsterdam in search of his mother. Each time he was expelled by the authorities because he could not provide any papers. In 1999 he was granted refugee status and residence permit in France.
He became an icon at the airport and became the subject of countless radio and television reports, both in France and abroad. In 2004, his story was made into a movie by director Steven Spielberg in “The Terminal”. Tom Hanks played the role of Nazarene.
After the film, the man reportedly ended up in an asylum in France. He is said to have spent most of the money he earned for the film, and returned to the airport a few weeks earlier. There, in Building 2F, he died shortly before noon on Saturday. Mehran Karimi Nasseri died of natural causes. He still had several thousand euros in his pocket.
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