At 12.33pm on 2 March, Valentinos Pangalos was ordered to activate sirens at Paphos international airport in Cyprus. An emergency had been declared. A suspicious object – thought to be a drone packed with explosives – had been detected heading towards the facility. Barely 12 hours earlier, an Iranian-made, Shahed-type drone had smashed into a hangar at RAF Akrotiri, raising the alarm further. The airport needed to be evacuated immediately.
“In 24 years of doing this job I’d never been asked to do anything like it,” said Pangalos, among the longest-serving officers at the island’s civil defence force. “To receive such an order, so abruptly, was intense.”
