These are not peaceful times in Europe. Since we’ve arrived in Nicosia, there have been major terrorist attacks in Ankara, Istanbul, Brussels, and Paris. A passenger jet was blown up over Egypt. We were initially excited about the great regional travel we’d get to do to places we’d love to visit but rather not live. However, in the last few months we have been warned off or forbidden from going to Israel and Egypt, and now it looks like Turkey might be heading that way too. We are strictly forbidden from traveling to Lebanon (or Syria, for obvious reasons). We frequently refer to Cyprus as “an island of stability” in a very, very troubled region.
But that doesn’t mean Cyprus is immune from drama and tragedy.
After our long weekend in Athens, I wandered into work on Tuesday morning expecting to catch up on emails and work on my annual review statement. We have a daily morning meeting with senior (-ish, because I’m there and I assure you I am not senior) staff and the Ambassador, where we go over what’s happening the press, get any guidance or taskings we need from the bosses, and then we start our day. On this particular Tuesday, our Public Affairs Officer told the group a plane had been reportedly hijacked and had just landed at Cyprus’ main airport, Larnaca. I think we were all a bit incredulous at first because when was the last time there was a hijacking of the sort where a plane actually lands?
As the morning unfolded, it was clear that a plane flying from Alexandria, Egypt to Cairo had in fact been hijacked. Given this was just a week after the Brussels airport attacks, and the flight was originating from Egypt, we were all a bit on-edge that our peaceful adopted home could become the scene of some terrible tragedy. And so we began waking up folks in Washington to let them know what had happened.
For about five hours while you all in California were sleeping, all the major stations– CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and I’m sure many others– were carrying a livestream of the plane on the runway. Since showing an image of a parked plane isn’t going to keep people on the channel, commentators filled that airtime with all sorts of “analysis” and information. So take the people 5,000 miles away that we just woke up, add highly speculative (and later revealed to be totally false) commentary the hijacker is a dual U.S.-Egyptian citizen, and you get lots of frantic emails from people in Washington and elsewhere asking for confirmation ASAP. The Embassy had already kicked into crisis gear by that time, and I was assigned to collect and sort through information that others from the Embassy were out and about collecting and determine what was worthy of making it into our “sitreps” (Situation Reports), which we then sent to a list of several dozen people. You would be surprised in a crisis how hard it is to confirm such simple facts as (1) how many people were on the plane; (2) how many hostages had been released; (3) how many Americans were there; (4) what did we know about the hijacker; and so on.
The whole thing came to an end at around 3 pm, with scenes of a pilot escaping out the cockpit window and the hijacker surrendering to the police. As it turns out, the hijacker was wearing a fake suicide belt and apparently had been trying to contact his Cypriot ex-wife. Cyprus’ president made a comment along the lines of “there’s always a woman involved” which prompted lots of angry reactions from feminists (but not Cypriots). Once the Internet realized this was a case of a lovelorn and (likely) mentally ill man…well, they really had a field day with it:
Of course, the most outrageous story of them all, which people are still talking about five days later is this guy who took a photo with the hijacker:
I would say all’s well that end’s well…but it’s pretty terrifying a single man can hijack and divert a plane. And Severin and I had just been debating about whether it was safe to go to Egypt. I daresay, he has won the argument.