Authors: Adrian Levy
That time had evidently come at Dabran. The Squad’s agent dug some more, coming up with an outline of events. The firefight had been a straightforward ambush, with the Indian Army intent on eliminating al Faran the minute they had let the hostages go, before they had a chance to get over the Line of Control: ‘Alpha had called the meet with the Turk, suggesting Dabran as a rendezvous, getting the information to the Turk’s men and making it look as if it was Sikander’s idea.’ The Turk had set off thinking he was meeting his commander to discuss their passage back to Pakistan. However, the army had been tipped off and was lying in wait, having staked out the
chinar
trees surrounding Dabran’s terraced paddy. ‘There was no need for the peace pact any more,’ the Squad concluded. ‘HM were crushed. The elections were pretty much a certainty. And the hostages were with Alpha, the government’s man. All of which made al Faran a mess to be tidied away.’
The Squad were convinced by this version of events, and passed it on to their superiors. They now fully expected the renegades to go after Sikander too. With him dead, the renegades would have destroyed virtually all of the living evidence of India’s connections to the Movement and al Faran. Apart from Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk.
In the second week of December, temperatures in downtown Srinagar slid to minus 3°C, which meant it would be deathly cold in the high mountains. On the 10th, a Crime Branch source, also well known to the STF and the renegades, emerged with a possible location for the hostages. According to the Crime Branch file, they were being held in a house in one of two remote twin villages, Mati and Gawran, the last settlements before the treacherous zigzag track up to the icy pass at Mardan Top. Consisting of only a few score stone-and-timber houses a five-hour hard drive from Anantnag, they clung to the Himalayan foothills like limpets on a storm-blasted rock.
In summer, the upper village was a destination for
mujahids
, local and foreign, who emerged from the woods to call on families that supported the insurgency. From there, the track carved through the treeline and bled away into steep scree slopes, marking the end of all plant life and the start of the stony higher mountains. Above, white vultures circled, while in the trees black bears coughed and barked. A hairpin path ran through the wild woods, strewn with boulders and criss-crossed with snowmelt streams. It eventually reached Mardan Top, from where the up-and-over into the Warwan could be made by anyone with the inclination and the leg power. In winter, the village was cut off from the outside world for months at a time.
Below, in the lower village, with its small unmade high street and a dozen shop-houses selling coils of rope, nails, hard biscuits, oil and soap, it was a different story. Since 1994, it had been colonised by the security forces, which used it as a gateway to control the flow of militants descending from the high passes. Several bullet-pocked white jeeps of the STF dominated the entrance to the village, and there was a well-guarded checkpoint, an STF garrison and a lodging house manned by Alpha’s men, who locals said had arrived in late 1994. The police and the renegades had warm shelters, with generators and braziers, and were well stocked with charcoal, food and booze. A cantilevered barrier, weighted at one end with smooth stones fished from the riverbed, blocked the road. No one passed without going through it, and men with rifles and hunting dogs patrolled the fields and woods on either side, day and night.
Although they had never been there, the Squad knew exactly what kind of place Mati Gawran was: a distant no man’s land, one of Kashmir’s secret killing grounds, where stories of atrocities committed by militants or, as often, by the security forces (or their paid proxies), were occasionally reported in the pages of
Greater Kashmir
but never in the
Times of India
. Serial rapes, punishment beatings, interrogations, humiliations and deaths – everyone understood that the crimes would never be investigated. The Squad knew that the scrubby hazelnut groves scattered around Mati Gawran’s lower reaches and the woodlands around its upper parts would be pitted with soft earth
mounds, the undulating evidence of hundreds, possibly thousands of killings, bodies dumped in unmarked graves, a legion of Kashmiri civilians who had fallen victim to Alpha’s men or their partners in the Indian security forces, who had become accustomed to processing their prisoners without even a nod to the law.
It was a grim place for the hostages to end up. Cruelty had turned the local populace mute. The Squad sought guidance from the higher-ups, and were granted permission for their informer to be sent back to Mati Gawran immediately. He drove south-east of Anantnag, through the Sosanwar Hills and into thick snow. After four hours he reached Vailoo, with its arched stone bridge over the Breng River. He passed the Clerk’s fiefdom and those black iron gates that concealed a mansion built on blood money, and the Indian paramilitary base where the Tiger hung out at night, anaesthetised with rum. These days, countless families stood around outside, pathetic huddles of women and children petitioning for the return of husbands, fathers, sons and brothers who had vanished. On went the informer, slipping and sliding in his battered Tata Sumo jeep along the pitted road into the mountains, the snow beaten into slush by convoys of military vehicles. Eventually he reached the turning for iced-over Lovloo, where in summer the Tiger sat in his garden, crushing walnuts as he took confessions from men who prostrated themselves in his garden of daisies, their last view in this life being of the dirt at his feet.
Sliding down the other side, the Squad’s source drove on, between terraced paddies and poplar trees, weaving from army camp to STF picket, towards Larnoo. In summer, a carpet of green pasture and wildflowers rolled from here into the forests, but now every village was hunkered down for the winter, the inhabitants sheltering behind felt-curtained windows, blankets pinned over wooden front doors. Many of them, no doubt, caressed laminated photographs of missing loved ones: Nazir Ahmed Deka, a vendor of perfumes; Ghulam Nabi Wani, the cloth hawker; Ali Mohammed Padder, small-time government employee; Abdul Rehman Padder, the village carpenter. And scores of others: Hassan, Imtiaz, Rashid, Javid – cobblers, shepherds
and poultrymen who now existed only as passport pictures that had been pinned to hoardings, doors and trees. They were so numerous that from a distance these images of the missing looked like stained glass.
The agent drove on, passing Gudraman, the scene of many violent clashes between militants and government-paid gunmen, until the drivable road reached lonely Mati Gawran. Arriving at the cantilevered barrier, he introduced himself at an STF picket in the lower village, where he was greeted with Lipton tea and embraces. Known by the police and Alpha’s men, he was waved inside a nearby house, half covered in snow and guarded by a heavily armed group who lounged in the back of an armoured Gypsy. Inside, ‘Alpha’s men sat around a fire, drinking from a quart bottle of Honeybee brandy, playing cards’. He exchanged greetings, and said he was tracking fugitive militants who were known to have come over the top. And then, as he went to go out of the back door, saying he needed to urinate, he saw them, just as he had been tipped off that he would: a group of weary, white-faced figures, huddled together in a corner under blankets: ‘No one had tried that hard to hide them. I stared and stared. There is no doubt in my mind, it was them, though I don’t know how many exactly. At least three? Maybe four. With long beards and matted hair, they were shivering in thin, dun-brown
pherans
, hugging
kangri
pots [braziers]. But then someone called me and I had to go back to the card game.’
How did the hostages seem, the Squad asked. ‘Exhausted, resigned and empty.’ He searched for the right words, or an image. ‘They looked like
bears
,’ he said after a long silence.
This man was one of their best agents: reliable and practised. Like
bears
. The Squad wrote it into the file. They believed his story. Having dispatched a report up the line, they were told to go to Mati Gawran immediately. They left Srinagar in the third week of December, beneath a smudged, snow-bearing sky. There was much to think about on the tortuous journey of bumps and skids, twists and turns. Taking the right fork after Vailoo and following the riverside road, the
once livid-green waterway now sluggish with ice, they turned left at Badihar to reach Iqbal Town, passing through the mourning village of Larnoo, before finally spotting the glimmer of burning braziers beside the cantilevered barrier that marked the outskirts of Mati Gawran.
It seemed peaceful enough. The river chuntered, trees crackled and hawks whistled high above. The Squad found the house beside the STF checkpoint, exactly as the informer described it. The door was bolted from the inside, and fresh snow was pressed up against it. Kicking it in, they rushed inside, lighting it with their torches, only to find the back door wide open, gusts of snow spilling across a concrete floor littered with empty cigarette packets and Honeybee brandy bottles. Having searched the house and found nothing significant, they knocked on the doors of neighbours and shopkeepers. No one seemed capable of recalling who had until recently occupied the building – as if, in this tiny tick of a village, it was possible for a group of strangers to pass unnoticed.
Frustrated, the Squad skittered back across the ice to Anantnag. For the next fortnight they returned to Mati Gawran many times, talking and checking, walking among the trees and fording a brook to search the dense and dangerous wooded slopes beyond, leading to wild Mardan, that no one controlled. But there was nothing to see, and still nobody could be persuaded to talk. A few spies remained behind to maintain a quieter surveillance. Some of the Clerk’s men swung by, the Squad heard. Bismillah was spotted a few times too, as were Alpha and the Clerk. But there was no sign of the hostages, although the STF remained a constant presence, its khaki-clad constables, clutching machine guns, arriving for unspecified operations, sometimes bundling terrified, hooded Kashmiris out of their Gypsy jeeps and into their closely guarded netted shelter.
For once, no report was sent up the line. Nothing would be said of this until the Squad had finished its investigations. They had travelled so far that they could not give up without discovering what had become of Don, Paul, Keith and Dirk, who after such a protracted case felt almost like brothers to them. As far as they knew, the four
Westerners were still alive, bargaining for their freedom or resigned to their deaths. The detectives of the Squad could not abandon these vulnerable men at such a critical moment.
Before winter’s end, the Squad at last got some real news, shocking intelligence that came close to breaking agents and sources who had not stopped working since they were first engaged in July 1995. Finally their contacts, who had risked their lives to become deeply embedded among the renegades and militants, had found an eyewitness to the hostages’ fate whose credentials checked out.
The source was one of the few Kashmiris who could come and go from Mati Gawran as he pleased. He was connected to the renegades, known to the police STF, and had worked as a scout with the army’s Rashtriya Rifles. Trusted, feared and (if he was honest) compromised too, having got his hands dirty fighting the militancy for many years, he proved his access by telling the Squad’s agents things about Alpha that only his closest aides could know. He went on to divulge that until very recently he had been working as a gunman for Alpha, a dogsbody stationed in and around Mati Gawran, where he had also served the Clerk. He claimed to be one of the last to see the hostages alive, and was prepared to meet the Squad and tell them what he had witnessed.
Once again the Squad converged on isolated Mati Gawran, finding the eyewitness waiting for them, just as he said he would be, in a clearing in the woods, snow settling on his shoulders. The hostages had returned to the village one more time in December 1995, he told them: ‘The foreigners were hustled into a house by some STF boys and renegades. Since everyone knew me, they let me in too, and I hung around, drinking and talking late into the night. At last, one of the Clerk’s top boys came in, saying they had received new orders and my duty was about to begin. We gathered up the hostages and walked them out into the snow. There was only one end waiting for them, and we all knew it. No one could risk the hostages being released and complaining of collusion, having seen uniforms and STF jeeps, possibly hearing things too that they understood. We led them into the trees, a good, hard walk behind the lower village. I remember that the snow was heavy and deep. And there they were shot. I did not do it,
but I saw it with my own eyes. Afterwards, village men were forced at gunpoint to dig a hole down through the frozen earth in which to bury the bodies.’
The Squad asked for a date. ‘24 December 1995.’
Wanting to check out the location, the Squad escorted the man through the woods. ‘He walked briskly, illustrating his story, tracing footsteps in the snow: convincingly, authoritatively. The details were compelling,’ one Squad member recollected. ‘But one tree looked like another, and although he tried for several hours, he could not pinpoint an exact burial.’ Was there money to spend on a search, the detectives asked their superiors. Could they hire sniffer dogs and thermal-imaging devices or ground-penetrating radar, and draft in foreign search teams? ‘If we deployed resources, the grave could have been found. We were all certain. But who was going to explain this story of broken allegiances and betrayals to the Western agencies who would be needed to assist with such an operation?’ the Squad member asked. No search was sanctioned. The request lay on file.
Haunted by what they had discovered, the Crime Branch team debated among themselves. It did not matter how many times they juggled the facts, looking back over all of these arduous months, they always came back to one unpalatable conclusion, says one of the detectives, a senior serving officer who agreed to talk at his government house outside Srinagar. Over
masala
omelettes and lime soda, he described the dawning realisation that their desire to solve the crime was at odds with the goals of some senior figures in the military and the intelligence services who could have saved the hostages, but chose not to. ‘Wrapping up the kidnapping quickly had suited Crime Branch and the desperate families, who we never met,’ he said, pushing his food around his plate. ‘For us this was a cruel, needless crime that had to be solved. However, for Alpha, who had become unimpeachable, and a few rogue officers in the STF who by now were behaving like gangsters, and for a hard-line clique of agents in Indian intelligence and the army, all of whom had come to operate outside the norms and with absolutely no oversight, there had been no virtue in ending the hostage-taking at all.’