18 Years in Transit: The Man Who Made an Airport His Home

By Aanesha Sharma

On a bench tucked deep inside Terminal 1 of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, surrounded by plastic bags, trolleys, and piles of papers, lived a man who seemed forgotten by the outside world. His name was Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who later came to be known as Sir Alfred. For 18 long years, the airport wasn't just a place he passed through, it became his home, and his prison.

Nasseri’s story begins in 1945 in Iran, where he was born to an Iranian doctor and a British mother. In 1973, the young Mehran left Iran for the University of Bradford in the UK. His return to Iran in 1977 coincided with his political protest against the Shah, a move he claimed led to the loss of his passport and statelessness. What followed was a desperate leap across Europe, chasing a flicker of home and identity. Belgium granted him refugee credentials in 1981, but that was not the end of his misfortune. Nasseri boarded a plane to London in 1988, hoping to settle there. But somewhere along the journey, he lost his refugee papers.

British immigration sent him back to France, but without documents, France refused him entry. His landing at Charles de Gaulle in August 1988 marked the beginning of an unimaginable exile. Arrested for lacking papers, he found himself trapped in limbo. Unable to enter France or return to any other country, he made the departure lounge of Terminal 1 his home.

Nasseri carved a life of bizarre normalcy on a red plastic bench, surrounded by luggage and cargo trolleys. He washed in public bathrooms, used staff showers, and collected food vouchers handed by sympathetic airport employees. Despite the surreal wallpaper of boarding calls and wheeling suitcases, he built friendships with airport staff and had fleeting encounters with curious travellers.

Days became months, months stretched to years, and Terminal 1 became his world for nearly two decades. Journalists came and went. In 2003, DreamWorks reportedly paid $250,000 for the rights to his story. His life inspired the opera “Flight”, the French film “Lost in Transit”, and most famously, Spielberg’s “The Terminal” starring Tom Hanks. Yet, unlike Hanks’ character, Nasseri’s real life never found a neat resolution.

Offers of residency or refugee papers from Belgium and France failed to lure him away, he refused them when bureaucrats failed to list him as “Sir Alfred Mehran” or acknowledge his preferred nationality. 

In July 2006, a health crisis pulled him out of terminal limbo. Hospitalised and later moved first to a hotel and then an Emmaus shelter, he finally stepped out. The outside world overwhelmed him, who had spent 18 years in a trance of departure announcements and arrival gates.

After years in a shelter, he returned quietly to the terminal in September 2022, as if the only home he could call his own beckoned him back. On November 12, 2022, surrounded by the ceaseless hum of an airport he had lived in for almost half his life, Nasseri suffered a fatal heart attack in Terminal 2F. He was 77.

Mehran Karimi Nasseri became a symbol. His story reflected the fragility of identity and belonging in a world built on paperwork and borders. Caught in systemic failure, he created meaning from the emptiness, journaling thousands of pages, forging connections with strangers, and living undeterred under harsh fluorescent lights.

His life stands as a silent testament: what happens to the stateless, the undocumented, the forgotten?

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