Just over a year ago, Greek pilot Vasileios Vasileiou checked into a luxury hilltop hotel in Kabul. The Intercontinental was popular with foreign visitors – which is why, on 20 January, Taliban gunmen stormed it, killing at least 40 people. Vasileios explains how he survived.
I had decided to go for dinner early – at six o'clock – with my friend, another pilot called Michael Poulikakos. It was the first time in the three or four months that I had been coming to the Intercontinental that I'd done this – usually I had dinner at around 8.30pm.
We finished dinner about 7.30pm and then I went up to my room – room 522 – on the top floor, to make some calls. At 8.47pm I was on the phone to Athens when I heard a big explosion down in the lobby.
I went out on to the balcony. I could see a man on the ground covered in blood and I could hear gunfire coming from inside and outside the hotel. I realised how lucky it was that I wasn't in the restaurant at that moment and said to myself, “OK Vasileios, you have to do…
