Airport prisoner scents freedom

CATHERINE FIELD reports on a man who has been 'in transit' for 11 years.

PARIS - His home is a bench by a basement shopping mall, between a pizzeria and a fastfood stand. His possessions are crammed into an airport trolley, which never leaves his side: a sports bag with a few wretched clothes, a shopping bag with some toiletries, some books, and in cardboard boxes his most precious possession, his diaries.

For the past 11 years, for almost a fifth of his life, Karim Nasser Miran has lived in Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, amid a tangle of concrete, bustling crowds, fluorescent lights and faded- futuristic architecture.

Iranian-born, claiming British ancestry but lacking any document to prove it or get him a passport, he is stateless.

Miran - dubbed "Monsieur Alfred" by the airport workers - has tried to enter countries across Europe, each of which has kicked him out and returned him like unwanted mail.

In the transient, strip-light world of Terminal One, he has been a permanent feature. Each day, he painstakingly fills out a page in his diary, as if to prove to the indifferent world that he exists.

Now, however, things may change. Miran is confident that he may be able to leave the airport terminal and start a new life. He says that officials have finally located a key document, issued in 1981 but lost in 1988, which could be his ticket to freedom.

Miran was in his 20s when his father died, prompting him to leave Iran in search of his biological mother, whom he believes to be either Scottish or Danish. After failing to track her down in Britain, he returned home in 1975, only to be stripped of his citizenship for agitating against the Shah.

The nightmare worsened. The British authorities refused to let him back in without guarantees from relatives, none of whom he knew. He tried and failed to enter Germany, Russia and Holland, from when he was expelled to Belgium.

Miran enjoyed a relatively stable five-year spell there, during which he was issued a certificate attesting that he was a political refugee, a status that enables stateless people to travel.

However, he says that document was stolen in 1988 in Paris, where he spent a short time in a French jail for having no papers before he wound up at the airport. With no revenue or a home, he has lived in the terminal, surviving on free meals and drinks given out by airport workers, who also let him use the showers in the toilets.

They give him access to a telephone and an airport doctor cared for him when he was sick.

Miran says he has now heard that the Belgian High Commissioner for Refugees has located the file and that the refugee certificate will shortly be issued anew.

"I am 54, but I haven't lost hope," he said. "I have been doing a correspondence course. The airport post office has been carefully setting aside all the mail for me. Every day, I set an alarm clock to ring at 7 am to start studying after my morning tea. I would like to go back to Brussels to do a degree."

After an 11-year wait, Monsieur Alfred may be about to leave his strange, impermanent, vulnerable little world. In the coming days, the loudspeakers of Terminal One will announce yet another departing flight, but this time it will be for him.