Authors: Adrian Levy
But after five months, Hans Christian was ready to go home. ‘Katarsis Teater and Kerala Kalakendra Proudly Presents a Kathakali Night’ proclaimed the flyer he produced in English and Malayalam for a performance he would give before he left Kerala. Hundreds came, curious to watch him play Bhima, a Hindu immortal of ‘great stature and unimaginable strength’ who was a brother of Lord Hanuman, the monkey deity. Hans Christian paid George to photograph and video the performance, and afterwards the verdict in Sreekrishnapuram was that it was the best graduation show they’d seen in years.
All that was left for him to do now was to visit Kashmir. The night after the show, he discussed his plan with the Namboodiris. They were appalled, warning him that Kashmir was a terrifying place of murderous
jihadis
and Pakistani
fidayeens
, or suicide bombers. Hans Christian almost came to blows with the Namboodiris’ eldest son after he accused them of being small-minded. They responded that they were Hindu Indians, and knew more than him about the truth of Kashmir. ‘I will go anyway,’ Hans Christian retorted. ‘If anything happens to me, it will be according to my fate.’
A few days later, the family tried again to dissuade him. A famed
kathakali
teacher was coming to stay in the village, and they urged Hans Christian to stay longer and train with him. Almost persuaded, Hans Christian tried to change his Air India ticket, but was unable to do so. He rang his mother. ‘I tried to buy him a new one so he could stay on in Kerala,’ she recalled, ‘but I couldn’t find him a seat anywhere.’ Instead, he bought a rail ticket, packed his Bhima costume and sent it back to Norway by ship.
Around midnight on 11 July 1995, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reached Marit’s brother on his mobile. ‘As soon as it rang I knew it was Hans Christian who was missing,’ said Marit. The family needed to supply a recent photograph, as the police in Kashmir were struggling to identify the missing trekker. ‘Kidnapped!’ Marit said. ‘It
was like a wicked dream.’ His twenty-five-year-old sister Anette, who was in Stockholm, got the call at two o’clock the next morning. ‘This is not happening,’ she thought. ‘It’s a joke.’
On 12 July Marit awoke to find reporters outside the house, and her son’s photograph all over the front pages. She panicked. ‘My elderly mother was in hospital. My father would be sitting at home alone watching television.’ Marit rang him, but before she could speak he said he had news for her, as he had just received a postcard from Kashmir. ‘So this card is the last one,’ Hans Christian began. ‘Now I’m in the mountain country. Here, it’s extremely fantastic … On the photo here, I have gone without a guide, this is at eight thousand feet. I am so happy you gave me the equipment (sleeping bag, etc). Please look after yourself. Give
mormor
[granny] a big hug. PS. I’m coming home on the night of 31 July 1995 … See you soon. HC.’ He had supplied a caption for the place he was writing from: ‘Mountain beauty of Pahalgam’.
If a car says anything about its owner, BBC man Yusuf Jameel’s battered motor said that while he was sufficiently affluent to have a vehicle (which set him above most Kashmiris), he was insufficiently corrupt for it to be a flashy trophy. In an impoverished valley where most working people could not conceive of ever being able to afford any set of wheels, the journalists who rode around town in brand-new Tata Sumos and Mahindras, and whose children were enrolled in top-notch private schools, were all rumoured to have been paid by warlords, religious leaders, intelligence agencies or politicians who expected the right words to be written and broadcast. While the finger of suspicion pointed at these men with their inexplicable wealth, Yusuf’s modest ride meant he had few detractors.
As he drove to work on the morning of 12 July, Yusuf’s head was filled with worries about the day ahead: the captives and the
yatra
. The previous day, all hell had broken loose in Srinagar when the news of a sixth kidnapping filtered down from Pahalgam. The phones at the red-brick Press Enclave, tucked in a cul-de-sac behind Residency Road, had been ringing for hours. Dozens of foreign news teams were already ensconced in the city, just around the corner at the dingy Ahdoo’s Hotel, where every telephone was tapped by one Indian agency or another, or a ten-minute drive away at the dour Welcome, a two-storey modernist beehive overlooking Dal Lake. The Western media were ravenous in their attempts to identify the sixth victim, hiring Kashmiri journalists, boosting their thin local salaries. By the time a name had emerged on 12 July – Hans Christian Ostrø, from
Norway – these local stringers were set running to gather what they could, in the absence of any comments from the silent Indian authorities or the terrified family in Oslo, where Hans Christian’s father, Hans Gustav Ostrø, was fielding all approaches.
It was now more than a week since the kidnappings of Don Hutchings, Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and John Childs, yet there had been nothing more from the kidnappers: no reaction to John Childs’ escape on 8 July, and nothing to confirm that ‘al Faran’ was behind the abductions of Ostrø or Dirk Hasert. All there was was a deadline, issued in the original al Faran demand Jane Schelly had brought down to Pahalgam, that now had just forty-eight hours to run. Two days in which to release twenty-one prisoners, or the five remaining hostages, representing four nationalities, would face unspecified ‘dire consequences’.
Arriving at the Press Enclave, Yusuf toyed with his personal theory, sparked by Sikander’s call on the night of 4 July, that al Faran was nothing but a subsidiary of the Movement, and that the kidnap party holed up in the hills was the same one that had been behind the two 1994 episodes. He wondered what to do with this potentially significant nugget. Nothing, for the moment, he decided. He still needed to work it up into something more substantial.
Tonight was the full moon, which signalled the official start of the pilgrimage to Amarnath Cave. Many reporters and photographers were heading to Pahalgam, both to catch the action and in the hope of picking up some titbits on the kidnappings. But Yusuf was going nowhere. He opted to stay put in Srinagar, judging that he would get more from his contacts on the phone than he would drinking tea in Pahalgam’s expensive tourist cafés. In the absence of a view from inside the kidnappers’ hideout, with Sikander remaining frustratingly silent, Yusuf spent the morning ringing round his police contacts.
Kashmiri reporters had a precarious relationship with the law. Hindu officers, and many of the senior Muslim higher-ups, viewed them as either untrustworthy or as spies for militant outfits. They were typically characterised as propagandists, hecklers and agitators, whipping up hysteria in the valley with their unhelpful reports on
police massacres, brutal army crackdowns and bloody cordon-and-search operations. But then, the police, whose ranks were dominated by Kashmiri Muslims except among the top tier – the Director General was invariably a Hindu, a New Delhi appointee – had their own problems: hated by the local population for being in the pay of New Delhi, and viewed as untrustworthy by other parts of the security apparatus, including the army, that were more firmly tethered to India.
Journalists like Yusuf, attached to one of the world’s most prestigious international broadcasters, occupied an awkward spot somewhere in the middle. He needed his police contacts, and there were many senior officers in the force who wanted to be heard, either ‘on the record’ or anonymously, for whom the BBC provided an incomparable platform. Among them was DSP Kifayat Haider at Bijbehara, a close contact Yusuf respected, and who he guessed would be at the centre of things right now. But today Haider was tight-lipped and in a strange mood. He claimed it was the combined stress of the
yatra
, his ongoing investigation of the bombing at Pahalgam bus station and the pressure of keeping a lid on the vicious response of the RSS: ‘He told me he feared the entire shooting match might go up in flames.’ ‘Talk to Crime Branch,’ Haider had suggested, bitterly referring to the team that had been sent up to Pahalgam by police headquarters, which he worried was deliberately undermining his role. There it was, out of the bag: a turf war between a good local officer like Haider and the specialists from Srinagar who had been drafted in over his head.
These days Crime Branch, which took responsibility for all non-militancy-related wrongdoings in the valley, was under the control of Rajinder Tikoo, a corpulent, philosophical Inspector General who Yusuf liked. Until the previous February, Tikoo had been IG of Kashmir Zone, the most senior operational officer in the valley, and had had dealings with the press on a daily basis. ‘IG Tikoo was his own man, someone who knew everything but told only what he wanted to,’ says Yusuf. Tikoo had a reputation for being articulate, irreverent and tricky, but Yusuf was hopeful that on this occasion he might be forthcoming. The IG took the journalist’s call straight away, but said little
of substance. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing I can say to you, Jameel
Sahib
,’ he said, adding cryptically, ‘Try elsewhere.’
Yusuf thought he knew what Tikoo meant. He was referring to his opposite number in the CID, Gopal Sharma, the valley’s police intelligence chief. Sharma had risen unobtrusively through the ranks. He had influence and information, but he was regarded as ‘a model of discretion’, rarely entertaining the press pack. It came as no surprise when he politely refused to speak to Yusuf.
Moving down his contact list, Yusuf tried the usual slack-lipped deputy and assistant superintendents dotted around the valley. But they were also unforthcoming, leaving Yusuf to conclude that everyone’s silence had been ordered. The whole valley was bottled up, it seemed, including the militants, who were also saying nothing.
He contemplated the photographs on his wall: Sikander, the Afghani and the Turk, taken by his friend Mushtaq Ali. Was Sikander sitting up there in the mountains in some
gujjar
hut with the hostages? Or hiding with them in a safe house in the heart of Anantnag town? Frustrated, Yusuf contemplated calling the Governor’s Security Advisor, General Saklani. But Saklani, Yusuf concluded, was all about control, and was unlikely to take some theories for a spin.
The army? Under normal circumstances, the army and its allies spoke to no one apart from their own kind, unless it was to threaten, chastise or clarify. And at the moment the army was a problem for Yusuf especially. Just two months back he had been given a vicious dressing down by the military over one of his reports about Charar-e-Sharief, the wooden shrine town that had gone up in smoke. The army was furious that he had repeated claims by residents that it was they who had burned it down, although Yusuf had even-handedly reported the army’s rejoinder that the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Mast Gul, holed up inside the shrine, was actually responsible. Unfortunately for Yusuf, the BBC editor who had cobbled the package together before it was broadcast in London had erroneously illustrated it with footage from another country altogether, showing Muslims under attack in Bosnia. It was a lazy mistake, but in the eyes of a paranoid Indian Army it looked as if the BBC was
propagandising, leaving Yusuf exposed. The BBC bureau in New Delhi was warned by an anonymous caller that their man in Kashmir was in serious trouble.
But this morning, sitting with his Lipton
chai
, Yusuf placed that threat in a mental drawer alongside the others, preferring to focus on the present situation. Without any help from the police or the army, he would do what all good journalists did to drum up information: take in the wider scene. He would concentrate on tracking down where Hans Christian Ostrø had stayed when he first arrived in Kashmir, ringing everyone he could think of in the trekking areas with a working phone line. Who had accompanied Ostrø? Yusuf had picked up the scent of what John Childs and Jane Schelly also suspected, that pretty much everyone in the Lidderwat Valley had known that the Movement was on the lookout for Western hostages on the afternoon of 8 July. Had a casual acquaintance of Ostrø’s given details to the kidnap team? Had Ostrø also been set up?
After a few calls, Yusuf discovered from sources in the tourism office that the Norwegian had spent his first couple of days in Kashmir on the
Montana
houseboat, one of the hundreds of floating hotels moored in Dal Lake. Taking a
shikara
out over the water, Yusuf tracked down Abdul Rashid Mir, the
Montana
’s owner, who was clearly terrified of the consequences of being wrapped up in a kidnapping, having heard from relatives in Pahalgam that all the pony-
wallahs
and guides who had been hired by the unfortunate trekkers were now undergoing intense questioning.
Eventually Yusuf coaxed Mir into talking. He confirmed that he had picked Ostrø up at Srinagar airport on 28 June, two days after Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had arrived, a week after Julie and Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley, and two days before John Childs. Ostrø and Mir had got chatting that night on the houseboat, Ostrø telling him how shocked he was at the security presence in the valley, and asking about the conflict in the region. Over cups of sweet
khawa
, green tea flavoured with saffron, almonds and cardamom, they had discussed Kashmir’s recent history, Ostrø noting some
of it down in a black notebook that Mir remembered he carried everywhere. The houseboat owner quickly realised Ostrø wasn’t like other tourists. Likeable and energetic, he wanted to know everything and anything about the people he was living with. ‘He was never bored,’ Mir recalled.
In turn, Ostrø had regaled Mir’s family with stories from home, telling them he had come to India after a gruelling stint in military service and the breakup of his marriage, and that the light in Kashmir reminded him of the far north of Norway. He played with Mir’s children, telling them Norwegian fairy tales. He asked Mir to take photographs of him in the regal surroundings of the houseboat, pictures that were later processed by the Kashmiri police after the film was recovered from Ostrø’s abandoned tent. In one, taken in the
Montana
’s intricately carved sitting room, dominated by a vast copper samovar, Ostrø sits on a sofa, dressed in a cream cotton shirt unbuttoned to the navel, looking relaxed and bronzed. He had grown a beard, and wrote in his notebook that he was thankful the necessity of remaining clean-shaven for his
kathakali
make-up was over. Ostrø also took pictures of Mir and his family in the functional portion of the boat where they lived, Mir smoking and looking pinch-faced with his young wife and two children beside him on the mattresses where they slept on the floor. Today the pictures are in an album kept by Hans Christian’s mother Marit Hesby, along with her son’s last letters and postcards.