Authors: Adrian Levy
Without consulting any of his contacts in Pakistan’s intelligence service, according to a senior Pakistan government source, Master Alvi travelled to Islamabad and called a press conference, in which he played the doting father. ‘I know how the families of the hostages must be hurting,’ he said, seeming to fight back tears. ‘I feel the same for my son. I know their agony.’ Claiming that his boy was simply a journalist who had also gone missing in Kashmir, Alvi continued guilefully: ‘One hundred times I appeal to the al Faran to release the hostages.’
Jane, who was on her way to Washington with her brother-in-law Don Snyder, could not believe this performance. They had been invited to the White House to watch President Clinton sign a Bill committing the US government to a very modest $1 million extra funding to fight terrorism at home and abroad, an issue that while becoming pressing, was not yet an international priority. Jane was certain Master Alvi was lying. ‘The most difficult thing about this situation is just waiting and finding the one thing that will bring [Don] home,’ she told a waiting crowd of reporters when she arrived at the White House. Flanked by her brother-in-law and other guests, including relatives of those killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in December 1988, in the World Trade Center attack of February 1993, and in the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995, Jane continued: ‘I don’t set my heart for any particular day. I just feel comfortable enough that some day he’s going to be returned to us, and I hope it’s safe and soon.’
After the ceremony on the South Lawn, Jane spoke of the impact of meeting other victims of terrorism: ‘It used to be that those things were unheard of, but more and more you know somebody else who’s a victim. Sooner or later, that becomes your neighbour or your husband. [Terrorism] is affecting all of us.’ At the end of the afternoon
she was ushered into the Blue Room to meet President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, who promised they were doing all they could to secure Don’s release. That night she reflected in her journal: ‘I couldn’t help but think how ironic it was that here I am sipping fresh orange juice at the White House while Don is probably eating lentils and rice in some shepherd’s hut.’
Barely three weeks later, on 13 May, six days after voting closed in one of India’s most fractious general elections in living memory, with corruption, Kashmir, security and public integrity the key issues, Prime Minister Rao was out of office, and other party leaders scrabbled to form a government in an unstable hung parliament. Jane took a call from the State Department. ‘A new report just came in that contradicts everything,’ she wrote. ‘The Indians have captured a high-level militant … he has said all the hostages were killed last December.’ Having spent the first four months of this election year building up the families’ hopes that the hostages were still alive, highlighting the story to show how Pakistan destabilised the subcontinent, the Indian authorities now changed course, claiming that they were dead.
Up in Srinagar, Ramm and co. were wondering what this ‘report’ was. The Squad thought it could not possibly have been theirs, which was far too raw. ‘There were so many things that no one could ever admit to,’ a Squad member recalled. ‘And as to the militant? Al Faran was gone, Sikander too, and most of his inner circle. Who was this man they had found, we wondered.’
As more details emerged, Jane struggled to remain composed: ‘I was really shook up when I heard this, but as much as I fear them being dead, I am very, very angry that we are now back in the garbage of last summer,’ she wrote in her journal. The State Department warned her that although the story had not been made public, she should prepare herself for a media onslaught. ‘I am going to say that I am aware of the rumour, but regard it as unconfirmed,’ she decided.
Over the next few hours, as she sat in Don’s study waiting for information to be phoned through, she could think of nothing but his death. Could it be possible that he was really gone? She was not
willing to give up. How could so many people have seen the hostages this year, if they were already dead? ‘It’s hard to believe, as the last reported sighting was just two days ago,’ she told friends.
Gradually, Jane learned more about the source of this story. He was a thirty-one-year-old Movement commander from Pakistan-administered Kashmir who had been caught three weeks back, and had revealed the hostage story after ‘several days of interrogation’. He had not witnessed the killings himself, the authorities conceded, but had heard about them, and gave a specific date: 13 December 1995, two days after the last al Faran communication, which said it no longer held the hostages. That, he said, was a lie, as the kidnappers had continued to hold the four men, having taken them south-east straight after losing their leader, the Turk, at Dabran on 4 December. On 13 December the four had been shot by the surviving members of al Faran in a dense forest close to Magam, a village south of the Clerk’s eyrie in Vailoo, on the banks of the Ahlan Nala River. The bodies had been disposed of in a local forest known as Ahlan Gadol, which was roughly twenty miles south-east of Anantnag, or a hard three-hour drive.
Jane began to panic. The account was detailed, and the Indians appeared to be taking it very seriously. In Srinagar, the Squad were incredulous. Elements of the real story had been combined with another, entirely new and fallacious, account, one that erased a far more scandalous run of events that had involved Sikander giving up his hostages to Alpha, acting on orders from his state handlers. ‘Now Pakistan and al Faran had been thrust back into the frame once more,’ a Squad detective said, ‘and we all wondered some more about this Movement commander who was supposedly spilling his guts.’
Two mornings later, on 15 May, as a new Prime Minister from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was sworn in to try to form a government, one of Jane’s friends called as she was getting ready for school. The woman had just heard the story on the radio: Indian officials were publicly conceding that the hostages might not be alive. Almost immediately Jane’s phone began ringing, everybody wanting a comment. She went off to work to avoid it. ‘So many of the students
wanted to know why our army just didn’t go in, have a big shoot-out and rescue them all,’ she said. ‘Got a lot of hugs,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘Spent a lot of time talking. I’m so very glad that I had the lead time to prepare myself mentally. To deal with the phone calls and the emotions all in the same day would have been too much.’
‘Give us Proof,’ screamed the headline in the Middlesbrough
Gazette
the next morning, over a picture of Keith sitting on a chair in the Sukhnoi guesthouse taken by al Faran the previous July. Julie gave the same statement as Jane: ‘We know about the situation, but we’ve had nothing confirmed.’ The British Foreign Office was also circumspect, a spokesman saying it was looking into the reports ‘as thoroughly as we can with the Indian authorities’.
The drip-drip of news continued, as if the Indian establishment no longer needed the men alive, and was now determined to kill them off. The captured militant was named as Naseer Mohammed Sodozey, said to be the Movement’s banker in Kashmir. He was from Palandiri, a town in Pakistan Kashmir. The Srinagar Press Enclave (recently renamed the Mushtaq Ali Press Colony, in memory of Yusuf Jameel’s friend) was briefed that for the past year Naseer had travelled back and forth across the Line of Control, distributing cash from Pakistan’s spy agency. He allegedly told his interrogators that during his travels he had learned that the kidnappers had become jittery at the end of September 1995, worried about getting trapped in Kashmir for the whole winter.
After two more months of failing to nail a deal with the Indians, and with the weather worsening, the ambush at Dabran in early December had been the last straw. Under pressure, Sikander had ordered the hostages’ executions a couple of days later. Naseer said he had been involved in putting out al Faran’s statement of 11 December, saying it no longer held the hostages, but that this had been a red herring. More than 120 pages of interrogation transcript were leaked to key Indian journalists in Jammu and New Delhi, who quoted Naseer telling his captors that he had learned about the killings in January 1996 from Parvez Ahmed Baba, a militant who sat on the Movement’s Kashmir
majlis
. Naseer also claimed to have an insight
into the execution of Hans Christian Ostrø, saying he had been killed because the Turk had received ‘a message from God that came to him in a dream’, resulting in the Norwegian being shot dead, before he was beheaded.
The families felt sick and suspicious. The confession was unfeasibly detailed and complete, and it had been leaked to the press two months before Naseer was even charged with any crime. Naseer had also got important details wrong, claiming that Ostrø had been shot, when he had not. ‘We didn’t know the first thing about this guy,’ Bob Wells recalled. ‘All we were being told came third-hand. He was a Pakistani militant, so how could we trust him to be telling the truth? But then again, we didn’t trust the Indians either.’ There was no physical evidence, Bob argued, only a prisoner’s lengthy, self-incriminating statement (in a valley where confessions were normally obtained through torture). Jane shared his doubts. ‘I imagined [Naseer] was under considerable physical pressure,’ she said curtly. The G4 were sceptical too, coming back to the issue of timing, wondering if the hostage story had served its purpose during the election campaign, raising the spectre of a Pakistani hidden hand unsettling the valley, but now had no purpose, as the new government needed stability (and peace in Kashmir, where elections were due).
The G4 tried to find corroboration. The two militants captured alive by the army at Dabran, whose interrogations revealed that al Faran had abandoned the captives, had somehow ‘disappeared’ in custody. Parvez Ahmed Baba, identified by Naseer as his source, had also vanished, and was being described in intelligence circles as having become an ‘Indian asset’. In Islamabad, American and British diplomats brokered meetings with the ISI, demanding access to Maulana Khalil, the founder of the Movement, and Farooq Kashmiri, its military commander. When the two were eventually produced at ISI headquarters they denied responsibility for the hostages’ deaths, pointing to previous al Faran statements that the kidnappers had given the Westerners up by the time Naseer claimed they were killed. If they had died on 13 December, said the two
jihadis
, the Indians must have done it. As if to drive home this point, an anonymous
phone call came in to the British High Commission in New Delhi, traced to Baramulla in north Kashmir, claiming that Naseer knew nothing about the kidnappings at all.
But India had invested a large amount of moral capital in Naseer’s confession, and had to see it through to the end. It needed physical evidence if it was finally to close the case neatly – or at least it needed to be seen to hunt for it. On 3 June, three days after the first prime minister to be anointed had resigned, unable to form a government, and as a second emerged at the head of a new fractious coalition, five hundred Kashmiri policemen with sniffer dogs were unleashed on Magam, a dank cleft between two mountains, hoping either to find the bodies, proving Naseer was right, or more likely, according to one member of the Squad, ‘finding nothing but showing the world that India had given this story a run at, before it put it to bed’.
The captured militant had been flown in by army helicopter, and according to Indian officials had helped narrow down the search area to a few square miles of heavily wooded hills. Warning that they could not afford any more kidnappings in what they described as dangerous, rebel-held territory, General Saklani and police chief Sabharwal laid on an impressive escort of fifty heavily armed soldiers to take foreign representatives, their numbers swelled at the last minute by diplomats including German Ambassador Frank Elbe, to the site. Terrified villagers turned out of their ramshackle houses by the security forces watched as dozens of white-and-green Gypsy jeeps, armoured personnel carriers and VIP Ambassador cars clattered by, clogging the hairpins usually plied by goat herders and pony convoys. At one point, so much traffic was on the road it was feared that the ancient arched bridge over the Breng River would collapse, and an engineer was sent from Anantnag to assess the damage.
As the search teams spread out into the forest, the silence punctured by the ‘thwack, thwack’ of bamboo
lathis
beating a path through the undergrowth, soldiers held back the press pack, who were straining for a glimpse. The spectacle was also watched by a handful of officers from Scotland Yard, the FBI and the German federal police. Thousands of miles away, Jane Schelly tried to distract herself,
spending her day immersed in work at school. Charlie Mangan got on with things, feigning indifference, telling the local press, ‘We don’t know much about what is happening.’ Bob and Dianne Wells waited for news with Paul’s siblings, Stuart and Sarah. ‘We had been unable to find Magam on any map,’ said Bob. ‘We just sat at home thinking about a village we could not locate, wondering about a man whose evidence we could not trust. Where in any of this horrendous mess was Paul?’
The search at Magam was called off after seventy-two fruitless hours. A week later, Paul and Keith’s families travelled to London for a three-hour briefing at the Foreign Office, where civil servants dismissed Naseer’s confession as unreliable. ‘So yet again we were back to square one,’ Bob Wells recalled. ‘No Paul, no body, no sense that anyone really knew what was going on. The only good to come out of this was that in not finding him, we could tell ourselves he was not yet proven dead.’
In Spokane, Jane came out of the Magam experience determined to assume control: ‘I was in a shambles. But you pull into the parking lot and dry your tears.’ She finally understood why Kim Housego’s father David had ignored his government’s plea to stay quiet, choosing instead to set fires under old newspaper contacts, reaching out beyond the Indian establishment and making as much noise as he could on his own. It was time for her to do the same, although she worried it might already be too late: ‘If I had intervened sooner, there are so many more things I could have done.’ She had always been her own woman, and over the past nine months she had got used to deferring to no one. The thought of returning to Kashmir by herself did not frighten her any longer. She wanted to get into Pakistan too.