And thus, his residency at Terminal One of the Charles de Gaulle Airport started.

At this point, he was out of options and out of money.

Eventually, he was once again sent back to France from England. He was tossed back and forth between England, Belgium, and France, but no government wanted to deal with him. So started a game of trans-national hot potato, with Nasseri as the potato being tossed around between countries. As you might have guessed, this didn’t fly with the authorities and he was sent back to France from England. Nonetheless, Nasseri still chose to board a plane for London without any documentation. According to other accounts, Nasseri sent his documentation back to Brussels while on route to England, lying about them being stolen. According to some reports, Nasseri’s briefcase that contained his refugee documentation was stolen while traveling on a train in Paris. It’s at this part of the story that things start to get a little hazy. (Photo Credit: Christophe Calais/Corbis via Getty Images) Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who prefers to be known as “Sir Alfred”, stands in front of a poster of Steven Spielberg’s movie “The Terminal” loosely based on his life in Charles de Gaulle Airport Terminal One where he has been living since 1988. Because of his political demonstrations and beliefs, he was stripped of his Iranian nationality and expelled from the country. Upon his return, Alfred claims he got wrapped up in the anti-Shah demonstrations, which, according to Sir Alfred, resulted in him being arrested and tortured. Alfred left home and went to study Yugoslav economics in northern England until 1974 when he returned to Iran. However, upon his father’s death in 1972, Sir Alfred’s family told him he was illegitimate and that his mother had been a Scottish nurse who worked for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.ĭue to his illegitimacy, his family rejected him after his father died. His father was an Iranian doctor working for the Oil Company. He has claimed to be Iranian, British, or Swedish. He was born in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company settlement located in Masjed Soleiman, Iran, in 1945, or 1947, or 1953.

No one, not even Sir Alfred himself, knows his history. (Photo Credit: STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/ Getty Images)Īnswering this question proves difficult. Mehran Karimi Nasseri examines monitors in Terminal One of the Charles De Gaulle airport, circa 2004.

Imdb the layover