“The bed that saved me from the Taliban” – The confession and the story of the Greek pilot who is stuck

The diary read January 20, 2018. Greek pilot Vassilios Vassilios checked in at a luxury hotel on top of a hill in Kabul. The Intercontinental was popular with foreign visitors. That is why Taliban militants invaded that day, killing at least 40 people.

“Last night the Intercontinental Hotel (…) was attacked. “The attack was carried out by five of our mujahideen,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban in an announcement that was distributed via email the day after the attack on 21/01/2018.

The following moments of the invasion were utter panic: The perpetrators started shooting their customers in the dining room. hotel, before invading rooms to take hostages, some of whom were shot on the spot or beheaded. They also caused a fire on the fourth floor, which burned for most of the night. Some of the customers managed to escape from the building by jumping from the windows of their rooms.

The descriptions of the Greek pilot for what they played and how he managed to live are breathtaking.

The attack on the restaurant and the bullets in the groceries

“I had decided to go to dinner early – at six – with my friend, another pilot, Michalis Poulikakos. It was the first time in three or four months that I was coming to the Intercontinental that I did this – I usually ate dinner around 8.30pm. We finished dinner around 7.30pm and then I went up to my room – room 522 – on the top floor to make a few phone calls. “I was talking on the phone with Athens at 8.47pm when I heard a big explosion in the lobby,” Mr Vassiliou told the BBC.

“I went out on the balcony. I saw a man on the ground full of blood and I heard gunshots inside and outside the hotel. I realized how lucky I was that I was not in the restaurant at the time and I said to myself, “Okay, you have to do something to survive.”

I left the balcony door open and locked the door of my room. There were two beds in my suite, so I took one of the mattresses and put it on the door to protect myself from the grenades, and then I gathered some sheets, towels and clothes and made a rope that I could use to go up to the fourth floor. if needed.

“Because I’m a pilot and trainer, I’ve studied crisis management and decision making for years, so even if I’re just going to a restaurant or the theater, I’m thinking of sitting by the door or near the emergency exit – it’s automatic, almost second nature.” reports the Greek pilot.

When the Taliban arrived outside his room door

“I made the bed and the mattress on it look a little messy and the other one – the one from which I had removed the mattress – look neat. I turned off the light and decided to hide behind the heavy curtains and furniture in the dark.

About an hour and a half had passed, and although I did not know it at the time, the attackers had now killed almost everyone in the lobby, the restaurant and the first and second floors of the hotel. They had rushed from the third and fourth floors to the fifth and I heard them running on the roof above my head, where they managed to keep the helicopters of the international forces away.

“I heard gunshots in the nearby hallway and suddenly all the electricity in the hotel was cut off,” said the pilot, not knowing that this bed would be his salvation.

“I listened to the screams, I listened to the ball, then they laughed like it was a big party”

The first room on the fifth floor that the attackers entered was room 521, my adjoining room, which became their operational center throughout the overnight siege. I heard gunshots being fired at the door of my room

I fell to the floor and went under the bed that still had a mattress to try to protect myself. I was holding this single bed with my fists and my toes supporting the weight of the bed.

I could see a little, because the bed was about 10 inches above the air. They shot the lock, knocked on the door with a heavy hammer, and then four men entered my room. One immediately ran to the balcony because he saw that the door was open. I heard gunshots and thought that in the next few seconds I would probably die. I thought about my family, my children’s faces and the good and bad moments of my life.

The door was left open and the gunmen were constantly coming in and out. Then other doors began to open on the fifth floor. Right across the runway was a flight attendant and some other pilots I had worked with. Sometimes I heard their screams before they were executed. Sometimes nothing.

I think they opened all the doors on the fifth floor and killed whoever they found. I heard the screams, I heard the bullet and then they fell through the next door. Each time they laughed afterwards, as if they were playing or as if it were a big party or something.

When I got out around 3:00 in the morning, I realized that while I was hiding under one of the two beds they had shot the other bed and then lifted its wooden base to look for someone who might be hiding there.

The miracle of salvation and the “ghost”

Basiliou, as he mentioned, also had to face the danger of the big fire that the Taliban had put on the 5th floor and which was dangerously approaching his room. He went out on the balcony but the snipers who had been deployed to neutralize the kamikazes shot him as they passed him for one of the attackers.

Slowly he decided to go back into the room and the bathroom to get some necessities and got back under the life-saving bed. The smoke surrounded him but he managed to cope by doing some basics he had learned in firefighting training at Eleftherios Venizelos.

“Almost as soon as I got into bed they came back. One of the guys came and sat on the bed I was in. I could see his feet and he continued to spit on the floor. He gave orders to the others. Then he went to the bathroom and then went out on the balcony and shot some AK-47 cartridges.

Early in the morning, international forces began firing from a tank into the rooms. They focused on room 521, next to me, but they also fired on some other rooms, because the gunmen were moving and shooting from other places.

They set a second fire around six in the morning, just outside my room. The smoke did not smell like the usual smell you smell from wood or carpet fires. It was not a good smell. It was the smell of burning human bodies.

International forces outside threw water jets under pressure into the rooms to extinguish the flames and they smashed windows. The fire was quickly extinguished, but now I was soaking cold in a room with no windows or doors, on a cold night in Kabul when the outside temperature was around -3C.

At 11.30 a.m. there seemed to be only one gunman left near me – the man in room 521. A little later I started to hear other noises and people walking towards my room, but I could not see if they were good or bad. Around 11.40 a.m. someone shouted: “Police! Police!” with an Afghan accent, but I decided not to go out in case it was the bad guys. Then, after 10 or 20 seconds, I heard some people with English accents also shouting “Police!” and I was so happy that I started screaming and crawling out of bed.

I was black from the smoke, so they could not see my face and the four commandos shouted: “Stay down! Stay down! ” while they marked me with their weapons. One of them whispered, “This must be a ghost!”

I was frozen but I managed to say: “I am the captain of Kam Air. Please do not shoot! ” One of them said to me: “Okay, I will download you, but listen, I have to take a photo with you before we leave”, and I said that I would like to have a photo to remember that moment “, said the Greek pilot .

To add that “I was the last one to leave the hotel. All the survivors went to the British base in Kabul. As soon as I saw my colleague Michael there I was so happy I could not believe it. We had lost so many friends – so many people we worked with.

The State Department had told my family that they had evacuated all the survivors from the hotel, but that they had not found me, so my family believed that I had not succeeded. “You can not imagine their happiness when three or four hours later I called them and told them I was fine.”