Man who had been living in airport for 18 years died there
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: Eric Fougere/VIP Images/Corbis via Getty Images
How long do you spend in the airport? I mean, you're advised to get to departures between two and three hours before your flight - so not that long, really.
Well, one man spent a whopping 18 years in the same airport, and even ended up passing away in the terminal.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri is thought to have been born in 1945 in Israel, but it was the latter part of his life that grabbed many people's attention.
In 1988, Nasseri landed in France without the relevant paperwork required for him to live there.
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The Israeli could't return to his home country either as he'd been expelled from the country without a passport, something which led to him trying to gain asylum in Europe.
That did not exactly go to plan though, which led to an extended stay for Nasseri at the French airport.
He was given the right to seek refuge in Belgium, but he said that his luggage containing his official documents was stolen in a Parisian train station.
Arrested by French police, they couldn't deport him anywhere as he lacked any sort of official documents, and he ended up in Charles de Gaulle airport in August 1988.
For the next 18 years, he would be a permanent fixture in the airport's Terminal 1, spending most of that time being stuck in legal limbo.
When the refuge papers finally cleared in 1999, he was nervous about leaving the airport and reportedly refused to sign them, spending several more years living in the airport.
He would sleep on a red plastic bench inside the airport and managed to make friends with the staff working at the terminal, they nicknamed him 'Lord Alfred' and he became a famous face for passengers as they journeyed through the airport.
Nasseri continued to live in Charles de Gaulle airport by personal choice, calling the airport his home until 2006 when he was hospitalised and his sleeping area in the airport dismantled.
Once out of the airport, Nasseri lived in a shelter in Paris, though Charles de Gaulle staff said that in the final weeks before his death, he had started living in the airport again.
In November 2022, Nasseri passed away from a heart attack in the airport's Terminal 2F on 12 November, with a medical team unable to resuscitate him.
The man's bizarre story ended up becoming the loose inspiration for 2004 movie The Terminal starring Tom Hanks as a man unable to return to his home country and forced to live in an airport.
While Hanks' character was from a fictional Eastern European country and he spent his time living in JFK airport in the US, the key idea of a man trapped in political limbo and forced to live in an airport terminal was the main inspiration behind the movie.