Why did Sir Alfred not leave the airport?

AUGUST 1988

Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian traveller without valid documents, arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Belgium had recognised him as a refugee years earlier; the file that proved it vanished on the way, and his version was always the same: it was stolen from him at a Paris station while he was heading for England. The United Kingdom would not let him in and sent him back to the airport he had left. He could not enter France and there was no country that would take him back. He ended up in Terminal 1, a circular concrete building with walkways crossing its central void, and settled on a red bench in the departure area, on the lower level, next to a bar called Paris Bye Bye.

A terminal is built for everyone to pass through. The signs push you towards gates, baggage belts, taxis and planes. Nasseri turned that movement into an address: he put his suitcases nearby, kept his papers and organised his days around the airport's services. There was no order saying "you will live here". There was a succession of legal obstacles that produced no usable way out.

AUTUMN 1988

The man on the bench adopted a presentation of his own: Sir Alfred Mehran, the British name he claimed. In time, some of the staff called him Alfred too.

His life fitted in plain sight. He slept on the seat, washed in the lower-level toilets and kept his luggage around him, in boxes and bags stacked against the backrest. He had breakfast at the terminal's McDonald's, often with vouchers the employees gave him, and spent the day reading the newspapers they left him and writing notebooks that piled up beside the bench. The luggage never travelled and the notebooks grew.

The question began as a legal one: which country had to accept him, and with what documents. Nasseri could walk around the accessible parts of the terminal. What he did not have was a documented identity that opened one door without closing another.

1992

Four years after his arrival, the case finally reached a court. A French tribunal ruled that Nasseri had entered France legally and could not be expelled. The ruling removed the possibility of throwing him out of the country, but did not hand him the documents he needed to cross the border and settle legally outside the airport. He had won a case without getting a door.

Christian Bourguet, a French human rights lawyer, ran his defence for years and without charging. His fight was not against a jailer but against a loop: for another country to accept him he needed the refugee file Belgium had granted him, and to recover that file he had to turn up in Belgium, which he could not do without travel documents.

1995

Belgium, where he had been recognised as a refugee years before, offered him a route: travel there under the supervision of a social worker and rebuild the file from its territory. Nasseri said no. It was the first workable way out anyone put in front of him, and it was also the first one he turned down.

To anyone watching from a check-in queue, Sir Alfred might have looked like a passenger who had been waiting too long. To the staff he was by then a recognisable presence: a man who was there when a shift began and still there when it ended. His calendar was not measured by scheduled departures but by files, visits and newspapers.

He also signed autographs. He was an improbable celebrity: he had not crossed an ocean alone or broken a record, only stayed among benches, suitcases and departure boards. Travellers could meet him, ask for a signature and leave for another city three hours later. He went back to his notebooks. Philippe Bargain, head of the airport's medical service, treated him when it was needed, and that informal network — food, newspapers, conversation, a check-up — made the terminal liveable without turning it into a home.

1999

France finally granted him the paperwork he was missing: refugee documents and a residence permit that allowed him to enter, live and move legally outside the terminal. After eleven years, the way out was on the table in the form of a sheet of paper and a pen.

Nasseri refused to sign them.

It was not a one-day gesture. They took the papers to him, took them again, and each time he asked for the same thing: that the document say Sir Alfred Mehran and that it say British. Meanwhile the residence permit had been granted, dated and stamped, and he went on sleeping a few paces from the door he could have walked out of to use it.

The documents carried his real name, Mehran Karimi Nasseri, and identified him as Iranian. He insisted on being called Sir Alfred Mehran and on being British. Signing resolved the administrative case, but it required accepting an identity he did not recognise as his own.

Bourguet, who had managed to bring the solution close, could not sign for him. The authorities could offer a permit; they could not force him to accept the name written on it. For the first eleven years he lacked valid documents. From 1999 on, what kept him there was his refusal of those documents.

2004

DreamWorks paid for the rights to his story for The Terminal, released that year. Steven Spielberg turned the premise into a fiction about a traveller stranded in a New York airport. The film did not reproduce Nasseri's life, but it amplified the real man's fame: you could watch the Hollywood version on a Saturday, fly to Paris on the Monday and find the original sitting under the fluorescent lights of Terminal 1.

His own book came out that same year. The Terminal Man, written with the Briton Andrew Donkin from his notebooks, told his version: the journey, the lost papers, the return from England and the years of the red bench. Four years earlier a documentary had filmed him right there, surrounded by bags and by people walking past without looking at him.

The money changed his resources and not his routine. He went on reading, writing and receiving the curious beside the same bench.

JULY 2006

An ambulance took Nasseri out of Terminal 1 because of a health problem. Almost eighteen years had passed since his arrival. This time he did not cross the exit as a traveller or with a suitcase bound for a hotel: he did it as a patient.

He was admitted, operated on, and when he was discharged a social worker took charge of finding him somewhere. He never lived there again. The medical episode ended what the courts, the permits and the money had not managed to close.

2007-2021

From March 2007, Nasseri lived in an Emmaus shelter in Paris. The city that had spent so long on the other side of his legal problem became the place where he slept. His story, though, stayed stuck to Terminal 1 and the red bench.

Accounts of him compressed eighteen years into one sentence: a man got stuck in an airport. The sentence draws the eye and erases the change of 1999.

NOVEMBER 2022

Nasseri went back to the airport weeks before he died. He did not take his old bench: he settled in Terminal 2F, with his belongings. On 12 November 2022 he died there, at Charles de Gaulle, of a heart attack, with the bags beside him and several thousand euros on him. He had left in 2006, lived outside and come back, so his death did not extend the eighteen-year residence; it did close the story in the same building where it had started.

Philippe Bargain, the doctor who treated him for years, had already explained it in 1999, when Nasseri left the papers unsigned: "It was his choice. The French social services would have taken care of him, but he refused."