{O/C} To France, where an Iranian man who lived in the Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years -- a saga that somewhat inspired the Steven Spielberg film, "The Terminal", has passed away.
{RVO}
I'm talking about Mehran Karimi Nasseri. He succumbed to a heart attack in the airport's Terminal 2F at around mid-day on Saturday.
Born in 1945 in Soleiman, a part of Iran under British jurisdiction, Nasseri left Iran in 1974 to study in Britain.
But when he returned, he was jailed for protesting against the shah and expelled without a passport.
He had applied for political asylum in several European countries.
French police later arrested him, but couldn't deport him anywhere without any official documents.
That's how he ended up at Charles de Gaulle airport in August 1988 and has since stayed.
Further bureaucratic wrangling, coupled with increasingly stringent European immigration laws, once left him stateless for years.
But his mind-boggling saga also inspired the 2004 Steven Spielberg film of "The Terminal", with Tom Hanks playing Viktor Navorski who was trapped inside the international lounge at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
Nasseri was 76 years old.
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