Hello and thank you for downloading the witness history podcast from the BBC World

service with me Rachel Naylor. I'm going to tell you the story of the man who lived

in an airport for 18 years. I've been speaking to his biographer.

It's the 8th of August, 1988, and 42-year-old Miran Karumi Naziri has arrived at Shalda

airport in Paris. He was intending to change planes to get a plane to London. He wanted

to go and live in the United Kingdom. He wasn't allowed to board regulations and change

it in some way where you needed a valid passport to get on a plane and he became trapped

in France. That's Andrew Donkin, who helped write Miran's life story, the terminal man.

He didn't want to leave the airport because he'd been arrested a couple of times and

turned to prison in France because he didn't have the right papers to be there and he really,

really didn't want to go back there and he found that the airport was the one place he

could stay in France. It's a kind of diplomatic, no-man's land. You don't need French papers

to be able to stay there. I think there was a little bit of him that thought, well, if

I'd plonk myself down an airport bench and wait a couple of days, somebody will say,

okay, I'll go and then you can go through. I think he thought, if I stay here for a little

bit in a kind of silent protest, I will eventually get what I want and be allowed to go to

the UK. But Miran was wrong and he ended up staying in the airport for 18 years until 2006.

Andrew, an author, became aware of Miran's story in 2004. The phone went and I've always said,

could you be in charge of your airport by three or four o'clock today? We have someone

who's very interested in you working with them on their autobiography and I had to leave

almost immediately about half an hour later. And what was your first impression of him?

He is a very dignified man. In many ways, he had a very tough life. He was living in the middle

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