Merhan Karimi Nasseri was the one about the Iranian exile stuck at the Paris airport for 18 years is true. Surrounded by a mountain of his possessions near the Paris Bye Bye lounge at Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, In a French train station he was mugged and all his personal belongings stolen including his passport and the paperwork that indicated Nasseri was a refugee living in Belgium. In the Heathrow Airport at 1988 and without a passport, authorities captured him and deported him back to France. Upon arriving in France, the authorities there, who also refused to accept him without a passport, had no place to deport him to since there was no evidence of where he should be sent. They also refused to give him a visa.
Belgian refugee officials refused to mail his papers to him in France. They argued that Nasseri had to present himself in person so that they could be sure he was the same man to whom they had granted political asylum years before. But, inexplicably, the Belgian government refused at that point to allow Nasseri to return there. And under Belgian law a refugee who voluntarily leaves a country that has accepted him cannot return. Hence, without a Visa, Nasseri could not step outside of the Charles de Gaulle airport terminal and there he stayed, living in the airport, for the next 18 years.
Nasseri's life at the airport ended in July 2006, when he was hospitalized and his sitting place dismantled. By the end of January 2007 he left the hospital and was looked after by the airport's branch of the French Red Cross, he was lodged for a few weeks in a hotel close to the airport. On Monday March 6, 2007, he transferred to an Emmaus charity reception centre in Paris’s twentieth arrondissement.
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