Authors: Adrian Levy
Jane decided to grab the investigation and shake it until the truth dropped out. If nothing did, she could live with that. She called a small press conference in Spokane. ‘The year has not produced anything. Something has to change,’ she said. She also, with bated breath, had a conversation with John Childs, to whom she had not
spoken since meeting him at the government guesthouse in Srinagar on 9 July 1995, the day after he escaped from the kidnappers, when she had challenged him about why he had left Don behind.
John recalled: ‘We had both realised that keeping quiet was a bad idea, and that we had all been mistaken in going along with the demands to stay silent.’ He also remembered how the US State Department had dissuaded him from going back into the mountains in the hours after his rescue, while his memories of the hostage party’s location were fresh. ‘I tried and tried to get them to fly me up. I could have found the hut, and the route too. But they were adamant. They didn’t want to rock the boat: “Leave it to the Indians.” I guess none of us were important enough to go the extra couple of yards, to unhinge a nation’s diplomatic strategy.’
There were many regrets on both sides. But John agreed to do all he could to help Jane’s campaign for the truth. Irrespective of how painful it was for him to rake over the past, he knew he owed it to her, as well as to Don and the others.
Two weeks later, in late June 1996, almost a year to the day since she had flown to India with Don, Jane was back on a plane to New Delhi, alone and armed with a lengthy wish-list of meetings: with the Indian Army, police, politicians and prisoners. She’d learn how to do it: knocking on doors, holding press conferences and whatever else it took. She knew she was capable of it, and she was done with beating herself up.
Within hours of landing, having worked hard to set it up, Jane was in the governor’s pristine office inside an Indian prison, sitting opposite Naseer, the Movement militant who had claimed al Faran had killed her husband. Dressed in a clean, knee-length
kurta
, his hair and beard neatly trimmed, he mumbled in English, ‘I am sorry, I am sorry.’ Jane explained that she wanted hard information. Naseer nodded, but stuck closely to his previous statement. The hostages had been executed in Magam forest on 13 December 1995. He repeated the same inaccurate claim as before about Hans Christian Ostrø being shot. Everything was delivered as if it had been rote-learned from the 120-page so-called interrogation report leaked by the authorities. At
the end of their interview she watched as Naseer hobbled out of the room, his shackles clanking.
The moment Jane had arrived in India she had felt closer to Don, but already she could sense him drifting away. She had been unable to prise anything from Naseer, who was clearly preoccupied with saving his own life. He faced a death sentence for an enormous roster of crimes supposedly committed in the valley and in New Delhi. Some of them he was undoubtedly responsible for, but there were many others of which even the prison guards said he was innocent. It would take many years for all the multiple cases to be heard in court: prison officials expected his trials to run well into the new millennium, meaning there was a long time for a deal to be struck between the state and the defence. During this protracted period, Naseer could ill afford to rock the boat.
‘I found the prison experience draining, upsetting and emotional,’ Jane recalled, thinking that in spite of everything Naseer had seemed sincere, even if his precarious situation on death row had prevented him from coming clean. She took a walk around a park, trying not to get swept up in a wave of pessimism. But the day would get no better. Her next visit was to the normally positive Ambassador Frank Elbe at the German Embassy. She found him in no mood to cheer her up. Up until now everyone in the G4 had maintained an optimistic outlook. But following the Magam débâcle, Ambassador Elbe had had a change of heart. He told Jane that Dirk Hasert’s brother Berndt was on his way to India, and that he was going to warn him to ‘prepare for the worst’.
Jane left the Embassy feeling as if she had been slammed into a wall: ‘I felt so very alone. I walked around with a big knot of tension. It took me back to the summer of 1995, to the reports that Don had been killed, could be killed any day, would be killed, unless … I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. I couldn’t talk to a diplomat, and my family and friends didn’t have the background. It was the most traumatic event of the summer.’
Back in Spokane, Jane and Don’s friends were preparing to gather at the city’s Riverfront Park for a candlelit vigil to mark the first anniversary of the kidnapping. Some had prepared posters, including one that read, ‘Climb On, Climb Out, Climb Home’. But here in India, Jane felt as if she was falling apart, even before she reached Srinagar. Distraught, she called Julie Mangan in the UK. From the tone of her voice, Julie knew her friend was in trouble. ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ Julie recalled. She flew out to India that night, cancelling an appearance on the BBC World Service hosted by former Beirut hostage John McCarthy, scheduled to mark the eve of the Kashmir kidnapping anniversary. Cath, Bob Wells and Paul’s sister Sarah appeared without her.
Reunited at the US Embassy in New Delhi on 4 July 1996, a year since their lives had been thrown together in the Meadow, Julie rallied Jane. They had both been thinking they needed to claim their lives back, and flying to Srinagar would mark the start of that process. The flight must have had them on tenterhooks, as they looked down into the jaws of the Pir Panjal. But on landing, both of them found themselves feeling relieved. ‘I thought I would be very upset,’ Julie recalled. ‘But actually I felt much closer to Keith.’
Their first stop was Batamaloo, the Kashmiri police headquarters, where Director General Sabharwal was waiting for them, smiling nervously, his hair slicked down. Pens hovering above blank notebook pages, Jane and Julie had decided to comprehensively document everything, and to make it known to everyone they saw that whatever they told them was on the record. There was something they needed cleared up, Jane explained to Sabharwal. Either the authorities had believed the sightings of the hostages moving around Anantnag throughout the spring of 1996 (not to forget the DG’s own statement in March that Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk were very much alive), or they accepted Naseer’s story, that they been shot and buried in the forests of Magam in December 1995. It was one or the other, Jane said.
The DG paused, then winced and pursed his lips. ‘Money may have exchanged hands,’ he mumbled. What exactly did he mean, Jane asked. ‘Eyewitnesses may have been paid to make statements,’ he
expanded. Then he bulldozed on, leaving this provocative thought hanging, as if he had never expressed it. But Jane and Julie were already taking its implications in. Every sighting they had meticulously plotted on the trekking maps since January 1996 was potentially unreliable. They left Sabharwal’s office enraged by his casual admission. Out in the streets of Srinagar they tried to digest it. Coming back to the city now, armed with all the knowledge they had gained over the past year, Jane could not believe she had once considered it a holiday destination. Yet everywhere she and Julie went they saw young trekkers and backpackers, on their way to the mountains.
General Saklani was next. They expected the Security Advisor of all people to toe the line when it came to backing Naseer’s account. But from the moment their meeting started, Saklani distanced himself from the Movement’s financier. Naseer ‘could not be trusted’. There was plenty of ‘room for hope’. All this despite the hundreds of police who had been ferried to the hunt in Magam woods, and the weeks of hoopla surrounding Naseer’s confession. Jane and Julie were thrown, as they tried to understand how the General could have flipped so completely from believing in the deaths of the hostages to championing a continuing search. Saklani recited a gamut of new sightings, explaining how the police had come by the information, whether they were thought to be reliable, and plotting the hostages’ movements on a map. Jane and Julie concluded that it did not really matter what he thought – he probably did not have a personal view on anything that he was prepared to share. Saklani dutifully represented the opinions of others, and presumably these others had performed a volte-face on Naseer for some reason that was not clear. The women decided to take advantage of this apparent change of heart. They asked Saklani if he could help them to visit some of the key locations, and he agreed. Soon he was driving them to an airstrip, where they boarded an army helicopter. On 1 August they were flown to Kokernag, the scene of several reported sightings over the winter. However, as they landed, they were greeted by a press pack that Saklani had called to record every moment of what they now realised was a whistle-stop tour of Pakistan-backed terror in the valley.
Another election was coming, this time for the Kashmir state legislature, a key vote that would, if successful, see Governor’s Rule replaced by an elected Kashmir assembly, and release Saklani from a duty he had never wanted, but that had lasted four long years. Jane could feel the tension rising as people came out of their houses and spotted Indian military uniforms. No one wanted to talk to them. On 5 August Saklani flew them south again, heading this time for Magam, where the Naseer-inspired search had foundered. The helicopter landed in the village cemetery. The local
maulvi
scowled. People bolted. It was raining. Jane and Julie asked if they could walk alone, but here too the press pack thronged forward while the locals hung back. ‘The villagers said they knew nothing and had seen nothing,’ Julie said, frustrated. Some of them were baffled by the women’s presence, as the whole village still lived in fear of Alpha, who dominated the region, and who, as far as everyone knew, was a paid-up government ally.
After their visits had been completed, Jane and Julie felt they had been manipulated, and when they left Kashmir it was with Sabharwal’s gaffe about sightings elicited by cash ringing in their ears. They had resolved nothing. Naseer was a stooge, the sightings unreliable. But they had proved to themselves that they could go out into the deep countryside and meet people for themselves. As Jane saw it, this was the only way they would ever discover the truth. Next time they would do it with less fuss, and no escort. They would get people talking. As they said farewell to each other in New Delhi, they agreed to return after the local elections were wrapped up in October.
By October 1996, Jane and Julie’s low-profile trip had become something very different from what they had imagined, with Cath Moseley, Mavis and Charlie Mangan, Bob Wells and a British documentary film crew all wanting to come along. Jane had no desire to be filmed, but she was not the only one involved, and she respected the wishes of the others.
Bob Wells in particular wanted everything to be highly visible, having come to the same conclusion as David Housego: ‘The Foreign
Office had told us repeatedly that hostages never get released in a blaze of publicity, but we’d had enough of waiting for them to sort this out.’ He also wanted to go to Kashmir because he and Dianne had been talking about having some kind of memorial event for Paul, although they could not bring themselves to make it a funeral. ‘I would never be able to live with myself if we did that and then Paul came home,’ Bob said.
Things had got off on a sombre note when David Gore-Booth, the British High Commissioner, picked Bob up from Indira Gandhi International Airport and told him not to get his hopes up, as Paul was almost certainly dead. Even if the news was discouraging, Bob was pleased to hear someone speak his mind: ‘After so many lies, I was grateful that Gore-Booth was able to be straight. It set me up well for all the disappointments that were to follow.’ Mavis and Charlie’s visit, their first to the region, had been reported by the Middlesbrough
Gazette
, which made much of their working-class roots, describing them as ‘just two ordinary everyday Teessiders, she a dinner [lady], originally from Brambles Farm [council estate], and he a steel worker for forty-five years’. Until the previous year they had never even heard of Srinagar, Jammu, Islamabad or Muzaffarabad, but they had overcome their fears and saved up every penny to see things for themselves. Like the other families they were tired of being dictated to from afar, run ragged by people they had never met.
Arriving in Srinagar, the families, film crew and a G4 liaison officer were put up at the Welcome Hotel, overlooking Dal Lake. The previous year it had been crammed with journalists and photographers pursuing the hostage story, but now it was empty. Taking a look around town, Bob hardly noticed the mountains or the shimmering lake, the kestrels that swooped down from the hills to snatch fish from the water. Instead, he was overwhelmed by the militarised and decaying city: ‘The building next door to us had been commandeered as a police barracks. We were surrounded by bunkers. It was a bloody war zone, and yet these little rowing boats were going around the houseboats as if everything was normal.’ Julie was worried about how Keith’s parents would cope. ‘We feel quite guilty going to bed in a nice
duvet, thinking what are the boys sleeping on,’ said Mavis, as the film crew recorded their initial impressions. ‘You sit down at a table to eat, and think, what are the boys eating?’ That night she lay awake, listening to the sound of gunshots echoing across the lake: ‘I’d never even seen a gun before, and now they were going off all around me.’
The families kicked things off in the morning with a press conference, Cath, Julie and Jane announcing a ten-
lakh
-rupee (£20,000) reward, funded by the US State Department, for information leading to the hostages’ release. The British government had refused to participate, as it did not condone giving money for information, and Jane had worried that the cash might elicit more false rumours, such as those the Kashmir police had admitted disseminating in the first four months of 1996. Charlie Mangan made a poignant appeal: ‘We hope and pray to all the people in this country and Pakistan that they must know, they have sons of their own, they must know how we feel.’ He hesitated. The word ‘sons’ rattled in his throat. Cameras snapped, catching the moment his composure broke. ‘I just hope and pray that you get them out quick,’ he managed to say, before giving up.