Sept. 12: A Nigerian has been in detention at Calcutta airport for the past three days because immigration authorities won't let him enter the country and Biman Bangladesh, the airline that brought him, has refused to fly him out.

Aniago Christopher Emerie, 40, had arrived on September 9 from Yangon via Dhaka. He did not get past immigration. "Inadmissible due to immigration reasons," the authorities wrote on Emerie's Indian visa.

The information that Emerie's visa had been cancelled was conveyed to Biman Bangladesh with a request to "remove" him. The airline refused to do so on grounds of Emerie no longer having a valid visa for Dhaka or Yangon. Biman Bangladesh also mentioned that it does not operate any flight to Nigeria.

Myanmar and Bangladesh each had given Emerie a single-entry visa.

Immigration officials said Emerie had entered India in July on a tourist visa and stayed in Delhi. On September 1, he took a domestic flight to Calcutta and spent the night in the city before boarding a Bangladesh Biman flight the next day to reach Yangon via Dhaka.

Since returning to Calcutta and being denied entry, the deportees' room in the transit area of the integrated terminal's international section has been Emerie's temporary address. He has been living on sandwiches, burgers and canned fruit juice, just like Viktor Navorski in the 2004 Stephen Spielberg movie The Terminal.

Navorski, played by Tom Hanks, had been stuck at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport after being denied entry into the US because his (fictional) country Krakozhia was no longer recognised as a sovereign nation by the American government. He is not allowed to return either because he is suddenly "stateless" and hence without a valid passport.

Emerie, of course, can return to his country if only someone would take him back.

"Immigration officials in Calcutta asked us to remove Emerie to any part of the world. But it is not possible for us to do so," said Md. Fakhrul Islam, station manager of Biman Bangladesh at the airport.

Sources said immigration officials suspected that Emerie had been using his Indian tourist visa "for other purposes".

"We told the immigration authorities that he had a valid multiple-entry visa for India and that is why we had issued tickets to him. It is not our responsibility to fly him out of the country. If they want, they could hand him over to police," Biman Bangladesh said.

Emerie had paid $100 to the airline to buy him a ticket to Delhi, from where he intended to fly to Nigeria. Biman officials got him an Air India ticket, but the immigration authorities objected to it because it was a domestic flight and he would not have to cross the immigration section at Delhi airport.

Biman Bangladesh then booked Emerie on another Air India flight that would get him to the immigration area in Delhi. But airport officials said late on Tuesday that the Nigerian had refused to board that flight.