Authors: Adrian Levy
The first heavy snow was falling in the heights, night temperatures were plummeting, and the herders knew that the lush alluvial plain where Hans Christian had danced
kathakali
and Don had played volleyball were about to be covered in a blanket of ice. For the next six months the Warwan would be cut off from the world, and anyone who could get out would soon be on the move. Ramm and co. deduced that the kidnappers would have to move too, which made sense of these new sightings. It also made al Faran vulnerable.
A few days later, the hostage party had been spotted on a path leading over bleak Mardan Top, the 3,800-metre icy pass leading out of the Warwan Valley. It was a dangerous exit route, as there were countless accounts of nomads dying there from frostbite or exposure. After the ascent to this pass, the route cut through the mountains and across an ankle-breaking field of scree. Eventually it led into one of three parallel basins that ran south-west from the Warwan to Anantnag.
Soon, another sighting arrived. It came from nomads who placed the party at Kuzuz Nar, in a valley parallel to Mardan. If this information was correct, they had made it over the pass, but according to a report received by the British High Commission they had been badly affected by the ice climb, with a herder claiming that ‘two of the hostages and one of the kidnappers [were] now seeking treatment for snow blindness’. The punishing winter had begun in the Pir Panjal, part of the north-western complex of the great Himalayas that rise
behind it. In the New Delhi goldfish bowl the women dwelled on what all this meant. But softening the distressing images of men dazzled and burned by the first heavy snowfall was an apparent destination that had a winning logic to it: the south Kashmiri town of Anantnag. All of the sightings seemed to suggest that the kidnappers were zigzagging in the general direction of Sikander’s realm.
In 1994 the endgame had been played out in Anantnag, with Kim Housego and David Mackie released into the care of photographer Mushtaq Ali at the poplar nursery on the road to Pahalgam. Everyone prayed that winter was now forcing Sikander’s hand, and that the kidnappers were pushing towards another Anantnag handover. But the Indian Home Ministry disagreed. A spokesman advised caution, warning that the dense hills above Anantnag were a militant heartland, populated by partisan villagers who would give al Faran food and shelter. Most settlements east of the town had been transformed into fortified militant compounds, while subterranean arms caches, tunnels and hideouts riddled outlying forests. Winkling out the kidnappers from this region would be even more precarious than from the Warwan Valley, the Indians suggested. This depressing response, clashing with what local sources were saying and with what Roy Ramm sensed, cast the women into a new depression.
But as the days passed, the sightings continued, many of them extremely detailed. One described an ‘al Faran person sitting on bridge’ having an unguarded conversation with another militant about plans to move the hostages to ‘underground structures’ near Hapatnar. Another name, more research for Ramm and co., whose movements were restricted to the government compound in Srinagar. Unable to visit the Anantnag district for themselves, they had to be creative. No
A–Z
of Kashmir existed, and villages sometimes had more than one name: ancient Sanskrit, medieval Hindu, bastardised modern Kashmiri or Urdu equivalents. Often there were multiple spellings too. The foreign team had to use what local contacts they could muster – a driver, a baker, the shopkeeper who sold them cigarettes. Eventually they found Hapatnar on a map in a remote valley to the north of Kuzuz Nar.
For a couple of days there was nothing. Then a handful of militants were spotted at Brah, a village on the path linking Kuzuz Nar to Hapatnar. According to Ramm’s map, this was very close to where Hans Christian Ostrø’s body had been found. Two Westerners were also seen there, under the guard of militants. On 26 September they were sighted again, outside Brah in an ‘underground bunker’ to the east of Anantnag. The foreign negotiators issued a warning. Although al Faran seemed to be moving towards Anantnag, as it had done in 1994, India should act soon, or the kidnappers could feasibly keep the hostages hidden for months to come, with the snow covering their tracks.
A day or two later, a compounder (a village pharmacist) came forward. He claimed to have been forced by al Faran to walk blindfolded for eight miles deep into the forest, to treat some gunmen and two sick hostages. ‘One was much worse than the other,’ he said, but both were ‘deteriorating in extremely cold, unhygienic conditions with a restricted diet and psychological pressure’. He had not seen where they were staying, as he had been told to wait in a copse, and the hostages were brought to him.
For the partners, the hardest day was 12 October, the ninety-ninth day of captivity for Don, Keith and Paul, the ninety-fifth for Dirk. Thick snow now carpeted all of the upper reaches east of Anantnag, and the women, down in humid New Delhi, tried not to think too much about how their loved ones might be facing the milestone of one hundred days in captivity. The day plodded by like so many others, although Jane called home to Spokane, knowing friends there were marking the occasion with a meditation session in her back garden. Her and Don’s extended family of mountaineering enthusiasts, doctors and nurses had kept their home life going, watering the garden, caring for the two dogs, Bodhi and Homer, answering phone messages and dealing with the press. There had been candlelit vigils in local parks, and the people of Spokane had tied yellow ribbons around trees, trekking posts and other local landmarks to remind everyone that Don was still out there. Some had wanted to make more of a public fuss, such as picketing the local airport to warn travellers not to visit India. Jane had stopped them, asking everyone to keep
things low-key, in line with the repeated warnings from the diplomatic liaison officers that too much publicity could both scare off al Faran and turn the Indians hostile. In her heart, Jane was starting to think she needed to go home to her close friends and family. Nothing had been heard from the kidnappers in twenty-four days, and she felt as if she could achieve more in the United States lobbying for Don’s release than hanging around the oppressive Chanakyapuri compound, going stir crazy.
In Srinagar, Roy Ramm’s frustration was also mounting. He sensed al Faran was exhausted – the hostages too, no doubt. A deal was there for the taking, but he knew nothing of the negotiating process, or even if there was one ongoing. If only they could reach out and pluck the hostages, he said to himself every morning as he contemplated the pins blossoming on the map. Then, on 15 October, several eyewitnesses emerged at once. All reported seeing four hostages sitting in the back of a truck in Anantnag. This was tantalisingly close, just a ninety-minute drive from Srinagar. The Indian authorities came forward, but only for a spokesman from the Home Ministry to once again put the kibosh on things, dismissing any talk of a rescue. Militants stalked Anantnag just as they dominated the hills above it, the spokesman said, adding that the time lag between sightings and their reporting made them difficult to act upon. Any sweeps of the city by the security forces would lead to the hostages being killed, he warned, crushing any last remaining hopes that such action was being contemplated.
The foot-dragging and inertia continued, even as evidence of al Faran’s increasing desperation grew. A bus driver came forward to say thirty militants had hijacked his vehicle in broad daylight near Hapatnar. Among the party were four Western prisoners, one of whom was limping. The driver had taken them to a village he identified as Langanbal, where the militants had bought painkillers and antibiotics from a pharmacy before taking off east with a Kashmiri trekking guide.
A new pin was placed on the map at Langanbal, six miles from Pahalgam, where all this had started back in July. However preposterous the bus driver’s story seemed, Roy Ramm, who kept returning to
the Housego and Mackie abductions, found logic in it. Back in 1994, Sikander’s men had commandeered two taxis outside Pahalgam to take their footsore captives on the last part of their journey to the poplar nursery. Kim Housego later recounted how this last stage of their journey had become a farce when one of the taxis had suffered a puncture: ‘All the gunmen tried to cram into the other car, arguing over who would get a seat, an issue that became so heated that several gunmen had jumped into the open boot, spilling loaded weapons onto the road.’ Now, in Ramm’s mind, the only logical reason for Sikander to circle Anantnag was to engineer another hostage handover and somehow save face. The trick would be giving him something that would enable him to back out gracefully. Ramm hoped India was thrashing out the details in secret.
Back in Middlesbrough, Mavis and Charlie Mangan’s local paper, the
Gazette
, leapt on the sightings at Hapatnar and Langanbal, saying they ‘provide the first real evidence of [the hostages’] safety after negotiations … broke down a month ago’. But Keith’s parents struggled to comprehend why things were moving so slowly. In Blackburn, Bob Wells had cobbled together a map of the Kashmir region, using pages he had photocopied at a local library. Like Roy Ramm in Srinagar, Bob had marked all the sightings, and ran his finger along the paths and roads between them, concluding that the distance between Indian-controlled Srinagar and rebel-held Anantnag was infinitesimal. He could not understand why there was no rescue attempt. ‘It was so frustrating. But we just kept being told the same thing: the Indians were on top of things.’
On 24 October the hostages were spotted back in Anantnag, clothed in
pherans
and plastic shoes. Again, one of them was said to be limping. Ramm and his assistants wished they could talk directly to the witnesses. Everything that arrived from General Saklani’s office was shorn of particulars, making each account a mere waypoint, of little use as evidence in a building inquiry. That was being conducted elsewhere, Ramm was certain. He hoped the Kashmiri detectives, as coppers back home would have been doing, were crawling all over the countryside, even if their political masters were recalcitrant: ‘Anywhere
else in the world, the fraternity of police would have shared intelligence and war stories. Here
everything
was infused by politics, shrouded in secrecy and predicated by control.’
Something else was bugging Ramm and co. as they stared at the newly crowded map in their improvised operations room. An inconsistency. ‘Why were there so many hostage sightings in Anantnag, a turf that New Delhi maintained was completely under militant control? If al Faran was among its own then it would remain invisible here,’ Ramm told himself. Something was missing in their understanding of the situation on the ground in Anantnag.
In September, after cautiously interviewing villagers in the Warwan and sifting through the literary moraine left behind there by the hostages, scraps that revealed their desperate attempts to stay sane and their growing interdependence with their captors, the Kashmiri Crime Branch Squad had also concluded that al Faran was heading to Anantnag, and looking to broker some kind of deal. The detectives decided that they would try to intercept the hostage party as they descended from Mardan Top, in a mission they regarded as ‘going behind enemy lines’.
For six long and bloody years, the knotted pine forests above Anantnag, with their cascading mountain rivers, abandoned Mughal gardens and corkscrew tracks, the plateaux of paddy and the walnut groves, had cradled the
azadi
movement. Here a field of militant outfits had sprung up like purple saffron crocuses. Some groups were Kashmiri, others created by Pakistan. Most did not consist of battle-hardened
mujahids
, but of students, mechanics, tailors, carpenters, bakers, schoolteachers and the unemployed, an army of amateurs supported by hundreds of thousands of poor country people whose resentment of India kept their lips sealed. All too often the price of their loyalty was a terrible retribution from the Indian security forces: ancient wooden villages incinerated and angry garrisons parked outside the ruins, a corrosive cycle of military operations – crackdown, cordon-and-search and catch-and-kill – that saw thousands of residents detained without warrant, tortured and killed without a
trial, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves scattered throughout the district’s woods. Despite – and because of – the Indian brutality, outfits like Sikander’s Movement and Hizbul Mujahideen flourished. Although they fought with each other, bloodily, over supporters and territory, disagreeing bitterly too about religion and ideology, with HM winning the upper hand, collectively they still controlled most of the villages and hamlets in the Anantnag district, as the Squad knew from bitter experience.
Mushtaq Sadiq’s men arrived in the region in the third week of September, pitching up in Lovloo, a remote village of wooden houses strung out along a ridge twenty miles south-east of Anantnag. They had been tipped off that this was an important Movement stronghold, and they trod gingerly as they attempted to pick up al Faran’s trail. Lovloo was one of the last Kashmiri outposts before the hills became mountains, criss-crossed by perilous icy passes that led into the Warwan, and was, as far as the police knew, a dormitory for gunmen who came down from the heights at the end of summer, the village’s haylofts providing beds for the night.
However, what the Squad found in Lovloo was a Kashmiri calling himself ‘the Tiger’, who claimed he was paid by the Indian government to control all the villages visible on the hilltops above his home. A surly figure, who sat wrapped in his
pheran
in a well-tended garden of neon-yellow daisies in front of his cottage overlooking the routes down from Mardan Top, the Tiger was surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards, and openly carried a rifle. Unlike Lovloo’s other inhabitants – farmers and woodcutters who scurried away as soon as they saw outsiders – he was not frightened of anyone in authority. But he didn’t wear a uniform either.
The predatory Tiger, whose fat fingers have seen so much action over the years that he is barely able to close them in a handshake, still lives in Lovloo. His real name is Basir Ahmad Wagay, and he was formerly a builder by trade. His radio call-sign, ‘Tiger’, derived from the ostentatious moustache that curls around his cheeks, and from his self-professed ‘fondness for a brawl’. He had a vicious temper that got people jumping (including his wife and two daughters, who cowered
indoors, he said). ‘Fuck with me and I’ll fuck you up,’ the Tiger bragged as he crushed fresh walnuts in his fist, explaining candidly how he came to be roaming around Lovloo, openly armed to the teeth.