11-year wait for flight is over

IF YOU happen to be marooned for several hours in an airport lounge this summer, spare a thought for Karim Nasser Miran, or "Sir Alfred" as he prefers to be known.

Mr Miran, 54, a stateless citizen of Iranian and possibly Scottish origin, has just been given permission to leave Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, after waiting for a flight - any flight - for 11 years.

Since losing his status as a political refugee, Mr Miran has been living in the legal no-man's-land between the passport barrier and the gates at terminal one. He sleeps on a bench between a fast-food counter and a pizzeria, keeps all his belongings on an airport trolley and passes the time studying correspondence courses and keeping a journal of his life.

He owes his survival to the generosity of airport and shop staff, who give him money for food and allow him to make telephone calls and use their private showers.

Finally, after years of efforts by a French lawyer, giving his services free, and the intervention of the United Nations High Commissioner for refu-gees, "Sir Alfred" has been told that he is free to leave. The Belgian authorities, who withdrew his refugee status in 1983, have finally agreed to give him new identity papers, which leave him free to travel. As of yesterday, however, Mr Miran was still at the airport, waiting for "confirmation" of the details.

Airport staff wondered whether he would ever have the courage to leave. "We all hope he finds what he is looking for," said one shop employee. "But it's going to be hard for him to go. The airport has become his only home."

Mr Miran calls himself Sir Alfred in deference to what he understands to be his partly British origins. He believes his mother was a Scottish or possibly a Danish nurse, who met his father, a doctor, while working in Iran.

In 1974, after his father's death, he embarked on a search for his mother. After an unsuccessful trip to Scotland, he returned to Iran but was arrested and deported for having taken part in demonstrations against the Shah while abroad. He was refused political asylum in Britain, Russia, Germany and the Netherlands but finally allowed to live in Belgium.

This permission was withdrawn after he tried to make another trip to Britain to trace his roots. He was arrested as an illegal immigrant in France in 1988 and spent four months in jail before becoming marooned at the airport, where his presence was tolerated by the French authorities.

"I am 54 now but I have not given up hope. I would like perhaps to return to Brussels and get a diploma," he said. "I have been taking correspondence courses. The Post Office at the airport keeps all my letters very carefully. "

Tanni Gutnik, representative in Paris of the High Commissioner for Refugees, said: "This is a very special case, involving a psychologically vulnerable individual ... but it should have been possible to work things out sooner."