Merhan Karimi Nasseri has died after suffering a heart attack in Terminal 2F of the Paris airport around midday on Saturday, according to an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team tried to revive him but were unable to save him, the official said. The man became famous in 2004 when his case was made into a film by Steven Spielberg In the terminal’.
a movie life
Karimi Nasseri, believed to have been born in 1945, lived in Terminal 1 at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport from 1988 to 2006, first stuck in legal limbo because he lacked residence papers and then by choice, according to French media reports. He had lived there until 2006, when he was hospitalized and his seat was dismantled, and Nasseri was treated by the French Red Cross branch at the airport after his discharge from hospital before being housed in a Paris shelter since 2008.
According to local reports, an airport official claimed that he had been living at the airport again in recent weeks until his death shortly before noon on Saturday. Nasseri is said to have died of natural causes in Terminal 2F, likely a heart attack.
Tom Hanks played a Nasseri transcript named Viktor Navorski, an Eastern European man who is stuck in a New York airport when denied entry, but also unable to return to his home country due to a military coup. Nasseri called himself ‘Sir Alfred’ after his case became known to the world, and claimed a small section of the airport as his home. Nasseri had traveled to London, Berlin and Amsterdam in an attempt to locate his mother, but he was turned away from every country he landed in for failing to produce the correct documentation.
Nasseri developed an informal support network at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, with people providing him with food and medical aid, as well as a radio and books to pass the time. Obtained refugee status and the right to remain in France in 1999but decided not to leave the airport because he was afraid to return to his country.