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Mehran Karimi Nasseri died after a heart attack in Terminal 2F [1]
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Date: 2022-11-14
What kinds of principle compel one to live or die in an airport. If you’ve spent a long time waiting for a next flight, you might understand that in addition to the anxiety of traveling, the anxiety of waiting can get amplified. The reasons get even more complicated, even as there might be no different than being unhoused at an airport than on the streets.
An Iranian man who lived for 18 years in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport and inspired the 2004 Steven Spielberg film The Terminal died on Saturday in the airport, officials said.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri died after a heart attack in the airport’s Terminal 2F around midday, according to an official with the Paris airport authority. Police and a medical team treated him but were not able to save him, the official said.
Karimi Nasseri, who claimed to be British but is believed to have been born in 1945 in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, lived in the airport’s Terminal 1 from 1988 until 2006, first in legal limbo because he lacked residency papers and later by choice.
After spending some time at a hospital for an operation, then a hotel near the airport paid for with the money he’d received for film rights, and then a shelter for homeless people, he had returned to living at the airport again in recent weeks, the airport official said.
His saga inspired a 1993 French film and an opera by the composer Jonathan Dove, as well as Spielberg’s The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Though the director’s production company reportedly paid Nasseri a fee for the rights to his story, he is not named in the film or any of the official publicity material. An autobiography, ghostwritten by the British author Andrew Donkin, was published in 2004.
www.theguardian.com/...
(CNN) — . Since October, he had been staying in the secure side of the airport, relying on the kindness of strangers to buy him food, sleeping in the terminals and using the many bathroom facilities. It wasn't until an airport employee asked to see his ID that the jig was up. In January, local authorities arrested a 36-year-old man named Aditya Singh after he had spent three months living at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport . Since October, he had been staying in the secure side of the airport, relying on the kindness of strangers to buy him food, sleeping in the terminals and using the many bathroom facilities. It wasn't until an airport employee asked to see his ID that the jig was up. (CNN) —
Singh, however, is far from the first to pull off an extended stay. After more than two decades studying the history of airports, I've come across stories about individuals who have managed to take up residence in terminals for weeks, months and sometimes years.
Interestingly, though, not all of those who find themselves living in an airport do so of their own accord.
Blending in with the crowd
Whether it's in video games like "Airport City" or scholarship on topics like "airport urbanism," I'll often see the trope that airports are like "mini cities." I can see how this idea germinates: Airports, after all, have places of worship, policing, hotels, fine dining, shopping and mass transit.
But if airports are cities, they're rather strange ones, in that those running the "cities" prefer that no one actually takes up residence there.
Nonetheless, it is possible to live in airports because they do offer many of the basic amenities needed for survival: food, water, bathrooms and shelter. And while airport operations do not necessarily run 24/7, airport terminals often open very early in the morning and stay open until very late at night.
Many of the facilities are so large that those determined to stay -- such as the man at O'Hare -- can find ways to avoid detection for quite some time.
Experience: I lived in an airport for seven months - Hassan Al Kontar I slept under the escalator, surrounded by plastic barriers – the PA announcements would jerk me awake
I would try to remind myself I was not a criminal, and it was not my fault that my country was currently at war. I had a phone and experience in marketing, and wondered if that was something I could turn to my advantage. I set up Twitter and Instagram accounts and started sharing my story. There was little response at first, but after BBC News Asia highlighted my story, interest grew. Canada. Over the next few months, I received both encouragement and abuse online, and was approached endlessly by passengers requesting selfies. Most importantly, though, I made contact with a group of Canadians who helped ensure that I had everything I needed and worked tirelessly so that I was ultimately able to claim asylum in
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