FOR A FEW hours on Tuesday morning it looked like we were on the way to becoming a regional centre for hijacked planes but our hopes were dashed by noon when it emerged that the guy who had diverted the Egyptair plane to Larnaca was not a terrorist strapped with explosives, but a certifiable nutcase strapped with empty boxes.
Still, for those few hours the island of sun and love was the centre of world attention, the main news story in every country. It was 28 years since we last hosted a hijacked plane on the Larnaca airport runway – April 13, 1988 – and that ensured Kyproulla made the world news for at least a couple days because there were real terrorists involved.
This time we had to be satisfied with the nutcase playing the terrorist and just a few hours of international attention, which was not enough for us to enlighten the world media about the continuing Turkish occupation, the violation of our human rights and EEZ by Turkey and our refugees that everyone is totally indifferent to nowadays.
As the incident degenerated into an April Fool’s farce and we were faced with the danger of becoming a regional centre for joke hijacks it was reported that the 59-year-old hijacker Seif Eldin Mustafa claimed he brought the plane to Larnaca in order to contact his Cypriot ex-wife. How romantic was that?
COULD Seif’s act of Mills and Boon terror give rise to a spate of copy-cat hijacks on Valentine’s Day? I am sure one or two women that are bored of receiving red roses on February 14 might tell their partner “Forget the roses and dinner this year, if you really love me prove it by hijacking a plane and demanding to see me before you release the hostages.”
Fortunately, for passenger safety, the romance element of the hijack was soon debunked. A couple of days after Seif had been remanded his ex-wife revealed that he was a pretty lousy husband. He had left her to fend on her own for their four children as he returned to Egypt five years after their 1985 marriage and had not contacted his family in over two decades.
A PASSENGER on the Egyptair flight wrote about the experience on Facebook after returning home safely. We were sent it by a friend of a friend.
“I arrived safely in Cairo after a very long and tiring day. A day I will never forget. It is funny from your side I know haha. It was of course a very painful experience to be on a hijacked plane over the sea with a guy at the back of the plane who claimed he had explosives. Egypt airlines crew was really professional dealing with the situation and tried as much as possible to calm all the passengers…
“Most of the people managed to stay calm, but as usual passengers on board made my day; A lovely Egyptian chap decided to call all his family and friends one by one when we were about to land in Cyprus and in a very loud voice ‘ana Makhtooof ya mohamed,ana makhtooof ya fatma,etc lol)….. Another funny husband called his wife to tell her about some money he had hidden in a bank and the funniest part was that his wife had forgotten about the hijack and was asking him to repeat the name of the bank…
“Another guy was sleeping and woke up to be informed we were landing in Cyprus and his response was ‘why Cyprus? I will miss my connection’.”
Prez Nik making sure the story went on a little longer with a joke
THE INIMITABLE Prez Nik kept the hijack story alive for a bit longer than it deserved with his rather inappropriate (the politically correct called it sexist) comment during a joint news conference with the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, who was on a visit to Kyproulla.
After having a hearty laugh about the hijack he was asked, “please confirm that everything was about a woman” and said, “always there is a woman involved.” His comment did not go down well on social media, on which he was accused of sexism and misogyny.
“That’s women, always inciting hostage situations,” an Irish hackette sarcastically posted on Twitter, while the deputy editor of Huffington Post tweeted “#slowclap for casual sexism.” Other remarks were “Mediterranean patriarchy at its best” and “your sexist ignorance is showing.”
Bigger legend than Nik on this occasion was the British passenger Ben Innes whose ‘selfie’ with the hijacker made the round of the world. I loved Ben’s big boyish smile. “I stood by him and smiled while the stewardess did the snap,” he told The Sun, adding: “It was the best selfie ever.”
His mum was not impressed making the point that, technically speaking, it was not a selfie. “You can clearly see that it is not Ben who is taking the picture,” she told The Sun. Mum knows best.
KYPROULLA is not unique only for attracting joke hijackers. We are also unique in industrial relations. JCC, the Bank of Cyprus company that processes all credit card transactions, recently hired the daughter of the fascistic honorary president of ETYK union Loizos Hadjicostis to be in charge of human resources (not an April Fool’s joke).
Hadjcostis also has a daughter working for the BofC cultural department; she was working at Laiki Bank at which she was hired by her dad’s great friend Andreas Vgenopoulos, who got on extremely well with ETYK, but moved to the BofC when it was forced to employ all of bankrupt Laiki’s staff.
It is incredible that the bank would give a job to the daughter of the guy that has been terrorising, bullying and blackmailing its senior management for more than three decades, always imposing his diktats. Was Hadjicostis’ daughter the best candidate or did her father use his rather forceful methods of persuasion to land her the job?
In a rational world, any daughter of Hadjicostis would have been blacklisted by all Cypriot banks even if she were the best HR professional in the Middle East as retribution for all the decades of damage inflicted on the banks by her dad. It is high time for some reverse rusfeti.
THE SECOND attempt by the BofC to get rid of 250 staff, through the ludcicrous ‘voluntary retirement scheme,’ has flopped spectacularly. I read that only 75 workers applied for the scheme, which was about 25 more than for the first one.
According to a report in Phil, a third “more generous” scheme was being put together by the bank – a scheme similar to that offered by Alpha Bank to its staff. I do not know how reliable Phil’s report is because the paper’s source of information is usually ETYK.
The BofC and its CEO John Hourican would become a laughing stock if they put together a third, “more generous” voluntary retirement scheme. It would only lead staff to hold out for a fourth, even more generous scheme. And had Hourican not warned in a circular he sent out a few weeks ago that if the target of the bank was not met, there would be redundancies?
Such an option was, according to Phil, “troubling the management, because it is understood that in such a development it would be confronted by ETYK.” Perhaps the union will be more agreeable to redundancies now that the bank has given a job to Ms Hadjicostis.
NURSES voted overwhelmingly to return to work on Friday evening after some vague agreement was reached with the government. I bet receiving their March pay-check with more than two thirds of their pay deducted influenced their decision.
A day earlier, the AKEL-controlled union PEO, trying to raise the class war stakes, issued an announcement lambasting the government’s decision to buy nursing services and deploy staff from civil defence in order to counter the effects of the strike.
“The right to strike is sacred and must be respected,” it said, accusing the government of “strike-breaking tendencies” and “authoritarian mentalities.” The government decision, it said, “legitimises and formalises strike-breaking and dividing workers as a means of resolving industrial disputes, creating conditions of police rule and authoritarianism unknown in the industrial relations of the country.”
I was very disappointed the strike was over before the nurses could feel the effects of police rule and authoritarianism. As for PEO, it wanted the government to leave hospital patients without nursing care, to suffer or even die because the right to strike was sacred – certainly more sacred than people’s lives – and had to be respected.
Nurses exercising their sacred right to strike
WHAT I would like to know is who declared the right to strike sacred? Was there a Papal decree or a circular by the Ecumenical Patriarch saying that the right to strike was holy and had to be respected even at the cost of human lives? No, this idiotic slogan was thought up by the holy fathers of AKEL and, like so many other ideas, imposed on society as an article of faith. We have been hearing it being uttered by 90 per cent of our politicians who are Akelites without realising it.
AN ITEM we published on March 20 about a report on the English language website Russia Insider linking Prez Nik to a legal row involving Russian oligarchs bickering over a couple of billion bucks drew a response from the website. We had speculated that the report, appearing on a website that acts as a mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin, may have been a thinly-veiled threat aimed at discouraging Nik from pursuing a settlement.
It was pure speculation, but must have touched a raw nerve as the Insider took it very seriously and responded with a long article on March 30, the introduction of which said: “A US Government effort to advance Turkish interests on Cyprus, and block Russia’s relationship with the government in Nicosia has become the newest campaign of Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Ukraine and the campaign for regime change in Moscow. The target of the fresh campaign, according to media reporting in Cyprus, is President Nicos Anastasiades. After warning Anastasiades to stay away from Moscow a year ago, Nuland has been back to Nicosia twice – in September, and then again in December – with a combination of threats and rewards to get Anastasiades to submit.”
The article read as if it had been penned by the Russian government and repeated Nik’s link with his law office, quoting an unnamed Cypriot political analyst as saying: “You don’t have to be the US Embassy to know that on the weekend, [the President’s] official car is parked at his law office in Limassol so he can catch up on the hot business of the week.”
I might write more about this next week, if there is nothing more boring to report, but for those interested here is the link: http://russia-insider.com/en/us-threat-cyprus-president-nicos-anastasiades/ri13651
LIONEL Messi caused a stir in Egypt, after appearing on a television show and donating a pair of his football boots for a charity auction. MP and television presenter Said Hasasin labelled Messi’s offer “humiliating”. During his TV show he took off his shoes and said he would donate them to the poor of Argentina. His rant that followed was a classic: “Whose shoes do you want to sell, Messi? How much do you think it will get? You don’t know that the nail of a baby Egyptian is worth more than your shoes? Keep your shoes to yourself.
“Messi, we Egyptians are 90 million people, who have pride, we have shoes. We don’t eat off the money of other peoples’ shoes. I would have understood if he donated his Barcelona uniform to the Egyptians, it’s accepted. But just the shoes?
“It’s humiliating to all Egyptians and I do not accept this humiliation. Egyptians may not find food, but they have pride. We Egyptians have never been humiliated before during our seven thousand years of civilisation.”
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