Authors: Adrian Levy
Next, they trooped to police headquarters for an update from DG Sabharwal, who welcomed them in a darkened conference room. For Mavis and Charlie, it was their first experience of Indian officialdom, but Cath, Jane and Julie got their notebooks out. Sabharwal smiled, but looked uncomfortable. ‘Indirect reports sometimes emanate from quarters,’ he said, ‘but unless they are fully verified and corroborated, we are not pursuing them.’ He was picking up on what he had told Jane and Julie before, only now he was claiming that the process was vetted to rule out false positives. The women wrote his words down. Sabharwal straightened his collar. The hostages would soon be returned to their loved ones, he said. Someone asked if he could tell them straight, whether the men were alive. ‘Certainly, most certainly,’ he replied, appearing to have dismissed the Naseer episode and gone back to his position of March. The families said they were hoping to distribute reward posters around the valley, but they wanted to be discreet. The DG said he could help them do it without a fuss.
Their next stop was the offices of the newly-elected Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, the first civilian administrator in Kashmir since the militancy had taken hold, whose appointment had meant Saklani could head back at last to his modest apartment in the military cantonment of Mhow. After they had taken their seats, Abdullah made an announcement. ‘There are certain things I cannot say on record because it’s better and it’s for their safety,’ he said, plumping himself up as the new master with his hands on the reins in Kashmir. ‘But in ten days we will give you
proof
.’ Of what, someone asked. ‘That the hostages are alive,’ he replied. ‘He’s given us quite a significant promise,’ Cath said quietly.
Finally they were ready to make an unobtrusive sortie into the countryside. They stepped out of the Welcome Hotel, only to be met by a convoy of Ambassadors led by armoured trucks and Gypsy jeeps with paramilitary police and soldiers with submachine guns hanging out of their gaping doors. Pony carts and civilian vehicles were forced off the road as they sped south, heavily armed specialists from the Rashtriya Rifles riding the roof of the lead truck, their black bandanas flying as the vehicles barged and hooted through Kashmiri lives. Jane quietly fumed, until she was introduced to one of her travelling companions, Group Captain Jasminder Kahlon, the ace helicopter pilot who had plucked John Childs to safety. She listened eagerly as he gave her one of the only first-hand accounts of anything connected to the hostage crisis she had heard in sixteen months.
They approached Vail Nagbal village, the scene of Hans Christian Ostrø’s beheading. ‘I feel in a way we ought to go,’ said Cath, welling up. ‘To pay our respects,’ said Bob. ‘Yes,’ said Cath. ‘For Anette and his parents.’ Charlie was haunted by his imagination: ‘It was awful. The body in one place. His head in another.’ Bob took photographs, wishing he had any kind of certainty about Paul, even if it was a brutal one.
And then they were off again – whistles, canes, lights, sirens and balaclavas – until they came to the semi-deserted trekking station of Pahalgam, where it had all begun. Taking in the scenery, the densely wooded mountains carved up by two gushing rivers, Mavis understood the scale of the crime scene for the first time. ‘It breaks me up,
actually, just wondering where he is,’ she said, gazing at the Pir Panjal. ‘It’s just so vast. He could be anywhere, couldn’t he? I’d walk every inch of it if I could.’ Later, Jane confided in her journal: ‘We were required to check in first with the local authorities, who informed me that I would be allowed to walk up the valley only one or two kilometres in either direction. Trekking no longer occurs in this seemingly idyllic valley. I was angry. If only they had been this cautious before, instead of telling us, “No problem. Have a nice holiday.”’
Broken Dabran was next, Sikander’s village, where al Faran’s commander the Turk had been killed out in the paddy. ‘This is my husband,’ said Julie, standing in the mud and pointing at a laminated photo of Keith, hoping to make the villagers understand their plight. ‘He’s missing. It’s been a long time now.’ Women with their own missing – children, husbands and fathers – trudged past, shaking their heads. ‘How could they feel sorry for this handful of foreigners escorted by the security forces that they accused of having killed, detained and vanished thousands of Kashmiris without the world caring a jot?’ one customer mumbled to a shopkeeper. Eventually, Sikander’s mother was rousted from her house. Terrified, tears streaming, she recalled that afternoon: ‘I asked them if they knew I had lost a son too. The Western families had no idea.’ Bob winced seeing the old woman break down. ‘It was terrible,’ he recalled, crushed between his own desperation and the villagers’ tragedy.
Finally they were taken to Magam, stacked along sharp ridges and around hairpins, surrounded on all sides by hills and forests. Naseer had claimed that here, in a village under Alpha’s control, where he placed sentries by day and informers all night, the hostages had been concealed and then killed by the Movement. Earlier that day soldiers had poured into the village, and every man and boy had been forced out of their houses at gunpoint and ordered to squat down in the road and wait for the foreigners to arrive. They had been kept like this in the rain for seven hours, and now they were exhausted, sodden and angry.
Jane and the other women refused to get out of the car. Bob and Charlie were furious, and felt they had to go and talk to these people
who they feared had, by this single thoughtless action, been turned against their cause. ‘We’re so sorry for this,’ Bob told them. ‘We wanted to come quietly, see you and ask for your help.’ Charlie struggled to retain his composure: ‘They came here as holidaymakers, tourists in your country. They should have been allowed to go.’ He dried up. The villagers stared, filled with bile. A local student pushed his way to the front, shaking with anger. ‘What is our sin?’ he asked, barely able to hold back tears of frustration. The village had been repeatedly swamped, by militants and now by renegades, he told the Westerners. After that, Naseer and his procession of searchers and soldiers had come too. And now here were the families and their convoy. ‘Kashmir is very big,’ he stuttered, waving his arms to show the extent of the valley. ‘We have never seen them.’ A flurry of flashbulbs caught the moment. His heartfelt rage at having been humiliated was described by an army press attaché as ‘surly, disrespectful behaviour’ of the sort that justified the military’s overwhelming presence. With that vignette the family members understood why India had revived the hostage story, embracing their trip wholeheartedly.
There was nowhere else they wanted to go, other than home. Chief Minister Abdullah never came up with the news he promised. Nor did police chief Sabharwal.
The families did not give up when they arrived back in their own countries. They would never let go until they had proof. ‘Bones or a body’, as Bob put it. ‘I don’t want to think that they’re dead,’ said Mavis. Julie was the same: ‘I strongly believe Keith is alive. I want to believe, I am going to keep on believing. Otherwise I don’t think I could carry on.’
Jane was less certain. After Kashmir, she had made it to Pakistan, and talked to the Movement’s military commanders, picking up nothing other than a bad case of giardiasis. Her stomach in spasms, she had returned to the US to spend Christmas alone, opening a few presents, including a gourmet recipe book from her sister and brother-in-law, Nancy and Don Snyder. But even this act of kindness nettled. Who did they think she would cook for now? She read and
reread all the messages their friends had written the previous Christmas morning, almost six months after Don had been taken, having gathered at the house to light a candle. ‘Back then, I really didn’t think that he could ever be killed,’ she said. But twelve months on, she was struggling to stay positive. A couple of nights later she summoned up the strength to write down in her journal what she was really thinking: ‘In my heart I don’t believe he’s alive, but I’ve been wrong so many other times that I have no faith in gut feelings now. We had planned on growing old together.’ She finished off by addressing Don directly: ‘I love you sweetheart.’
In July 1997, the second anniversary of the kidnapping, Jane returned to Kashmir for one more try. This time she was alone, having secured an offer of a US$2 million (£1.2 million) reward from the US Department of Justice. ‘I realise at some point, if Don doesn’t come back, I will have to concede that my life goes forward,’ she wrote. ‘I want to be able to look back and know I did everything. I don’t want to say, “I should have done that,” because it will be too late.’ In her luggage she had brought along thousands of lavender-coloured fold-up matchbooks, printed with details of the reward, in the knowledge that ‘almost every Kashmir man smoked’.
Travelling with a Kashmiri politician on his campaign trail, Jane flew over the snowcapped crags to the Warwan Valley. Escorted everywhere she went, she found the villagers fascinated by her story, but wary of eavesdroppers, as the militancy still held the valley in its grip. ‘We dropped down after crossing spectacular and rugged terrain in the Indian Army five-seat helicopter,’ Jane wrote. ‘We saw caravans of ponies, sometimes twelve to twenty-two in a group, heavily loaded with supplies, travelling amongst flocks of sheep being herded by their nomadic
bakarwal
shepherds from the desert areas. We were in the heart of militant country, I was told. Hans Christian Ostrø’s beheaded body was found on 13 August 1995, just fifteen miles due east of here.’
At Inshan, the southernmost village in the valley, from where the treacherous track reached up to Mardan Top, the pilot brought the
helicopter down on a white ‘X’ in the middle of a field near the mosque. Hundreds of villagers were waiting. ‘Army commanders escorted me to where most of the women and children were assembled. In just moments, the crowd overcame their hesitation and pressed close to me. As I talked about the reward for information and began to hand out posters and matchbooks, reluctance disappeared and hands shot out, snatching the papers right out of my grip. My three photo books were pawed over. I heard exclamations as they saw the pictures of the hostages tied up. I asked if they had ever seen these men. Yes. They said the hostages played cricket and soccer “Right here,” as they pointed to an open grass field. I asked if they were ever tied up. No. They were free. The captors washed their clothes. Did the hostages ever speak of their families? No. They said they just wanted to be free.’
There was no time to linger in the village. The helicopter was waiting to take them further south. ‘In Dachin,’ Jane wrote, ‘two medical assistants said they treated the hostages on 5 and 7 September [1995] six hours by foot up the valley at Afti. Don had conjunctivitis for two days, and influenza. Paul Wells had dysentery. Twenty-five militants were with them. Very tall kidnappers, long beards. Foreigners. They didn’t understand the language. They were heavily armed.’ Jane struggled to take notes, worried to be relying on an Indian Army translator she did not trust: ‘I would hear two minutes of talk, then get a twenty-second rerun,’ she wrote later in her journal. ‘What had I missed? These were people who had been in contact with Don, who were in the midst of telling me about him, when suddenly … the helicopter blades were warmed up and whopping at full speed, and I was being called to leave. I was so close. I had a taste. I want so much more.’
But this would be as near as she would get. The remainder of her trip turned into a fug of illness, insects, humidity and cancelled appointments, leaving her yearning for Spokane. On 8 August she wrote in her journal: ‘I’m sick and tired of it all and I want to go home. Be done with the whole thing. I’m tired of the water tap not working, sick of all the flies sitting all over me. Tired of waiting,
honking horns, dirty and smelly diesel fumes, stupid traffic jams, idiotic security who are afraid a raisin will explode, and so on … But at least one of these days I can go home.’
Bob Wells would return to Kashmir one last time that November, travelling with Jane, Julie, Cath, and Dirk’s sister Birgit in a trip facilitated by the Indian authorities. Mavis Mangan was supposed to have come too, but she had suffered a heart attack after her previous visit, and Charlie had recently been diagnosed with angina. Losing Keith was destroying them both.
Arriving in Srinagar, Bob was immediately pulled aside and told the valley’s police chief wanted to see him. Paramdeep Gill, Inspector General (IG) Kashmir Zone, an officer who had been closely connected to the universally feared STF, the man who had personally overseen the defection of Alpha’s men back in 1994, leading to the creation of the hated pro-government militias, had something private to discuss.
Taking a family liaison officer from the British High Commission with him, Bob was ushered into a wood-panelled room with blacked-out windows in a large, heavily guarded police complex in the Srinagar district of Batamaloo. Gill told him he had started his own inquiry into the hostage crisis, an unofficial diversion that he was certain, with his abilities, would get to the truth. The al Faran Crime Branch probe – which had been sealed – was, Gill felt sure, incompetent or inadequate, or both. Then, without warning, he pushed a couple of photographs across the table. One of them was a graphic image of a decomposing head. ‘We’ve found your son,’ he said. Bob was horrified. He forced himself to look, trying to see beyond the rendered flesh and flaps of hair, and wondering what kind of way this was to break the death of a child to a father. ‘That’s not my son,’ he said at last, tears of rage stinging his face. Paul had undergone extensive dental work before heading off to Kashmir in June 1995, but this head did not have a single filling.
Gill was not listening. For six months, he said, the STF had been following up leads that had led them to a grave in the cemetery of
Akingham, a small town just south of the Mughal gardens at Achhabal, in the hills above Anantnag town. There they had dug up a body wrapped in a grey shawl, buried without Islamic rites. It was Paul Wells, he claimed, tapping the photos on his desk. ‘You know nothing,’ said Bob, reddening and standing to leave. ‘This is a disgusting circus!’ he shouted.