“The passport is the noblest part of a person,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in his “Refugee Talks” in the early 1940s. Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who claims to have fled Iran, lost this part. It is not entirely clear whether his papers were stolen in November 1988 in the transit area of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris or whether he arrived without a passport. The fact that Nasseri could prove neither his identity nor his refugee status had fatal consequences.
He was not allowed to continue to London as planned, but he was also not allowed to leave the airport. So he stayed where he was and installed himself in an alcove in Terminal 1. For years, Nasseri, who called himself “Sir Alfred”, tried to be accepted in several European countries without success. He didn’t get a visa for France until 1999, but he lived for another seven years in the alcove under an airport escalator where he had set himself up. Journalists who have repeatedly portrayed him over the years report that he is a quiet, withdrawn person.
Now Mehran Karimi Nasseri is dead. He died of natural causes in Terminal 2F of the airport on Saturday afternoon. In mid-September, the 76-year-old moved back to the airport after previously living in a home and most recently in a hotel. He always sat in the same spot with his belongings in a trolley, airport workers told the newspaper Le Parisien. Recently he had hardly spoken and stared into space. A few thousand euros were found on him, the newspaper reports.
Nasseri’s story had inspired Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film “Terminal” with Tom Hanks, ten years earlier there had already been a French film with Jean Rochefort about his fate. With the money he got for the Spielberg film, Nasseri moved into a hotel. After the death of the “terminal man,” as he called himself in an autobiographical novel, the airport covered his seat with a white sheet.