I was so excited and full of adrenaline that I put my hand over my mouth in case I started laughing. He disappeared after a few minutes.

I was so tired. I’d had to fly late the night before all of this began, then hadn’t slept the day or night previously, so I’d been awake for more than 35 or 40 hours.

Not much later I began to hear other noises and people walking towards my room but I couldn’t see if it was the bad guys or the good guys. Around 11.40am somebody called out, “Police! Police!” in an Afghan accent, but I decided not to come 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 began yelling and crawling out of the bed. It was difficult to get out and I could barely breathe – my chest was hurting so much from being inside the bed, in one position, for so long.

I was black with smoke so they couldn’t see my face and the four commandos were shouting, “Stay down! Stay down!” while pointing their guns at me.

One of them whispered: “This must be a ghost!”

I was freezing cold but managed to say, “I’m the captain from Kam Air. Please, don’t shoot!”

They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They asked me how many hours I’d been there. I told them I’d been there all the time. They looked at the bed and asked me how I had managed to survive.

One of them said to me, “OK, I’m gonna take you down, but listen, I have to have a photo with you before we go,” and I said I’d like to have a photo to remember that moment too.