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Friday, 19 August 2016

Syrian refugee was stuck in an airport for a year, and it was nothing like The Terminal

A Syrian refugee is living Tom Hanks’ life from The Terminal: Fadi Mansour has been stuck inside Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport for over a year, Patrick Kingsley writes. Upon reaching Turkey in November 2014 and finding out he could not seek legal work, Mansour bought a fake passport and attempted to fly to Germany. His flight went via Kuala Lumpur, and the border police there detected his false paperwork and sent him back to Turkey, where he was taken to a detention room instead of being readmitted. “When I watched the movie [The Terminal], I realised they were dealing with it in a comic way, and my situation was not very comic. He used to eat hamburgers and I used to eat hamburgers. But Tom Hanks was free to go around the airport, whereas I was just stuck in a single room… There were no windows and I didn’t see daylight for eight months … they kept the lights on 24 hours a day. I don’t know how I got out of that room capable of walking,” Mansour says. After being trapped in Atatürk Airport for 12 months, he was ultimately released after Australia heard of his case and agreed to give him asylum. Read his story in the Guardian.

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