The Meadow (72 page)

In their place, a building movement for reconciliation is emerging, that might just come up with the truth, and locate many more bodies. As a result of the thaw in Kashmir, for the first time members of the old al Faran Squad have spilled secrets they had been forced to sit on for sixteen years about a case they believed they had solved but whose conclusions were so stark that they too were buried. Their sources too have come out into the open – the agents and informers who helped piece together the complex Crime Branch investigation that can only really be laid to rest when Don, Keith, Dirk and Paul’s remains are found.

Searching for the appropriate words with which to address the silent masses in the security services, the villagers in the deep countryside, the law enforcers and policy-makers in Srinagar and New Delhi, SSP Yatoo eventually found some that applied just as well to the many vanished Kashmiris as to the abduction and disappearance of five Western trekkers, a crime that transformed this Himalayan paradise, in the eyes of the West, into a cauldron of Islamic terror. ‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead,’ Yatoo said in September 2011, quoting William Gladstone, ‘and I will measure the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.’

The route to the Meadow, a photograph taken by Norwegian trekker Hans Christian Ostrø shortly before he was kidnapped on 4 July 1995.

(Left to right) Julie and Keith Mangan together with Catherine Moseley trek towards the Meadow in early July 1995. PHOTO
BY
PAUL
WELLS.

(Left to right) Cath, Keith and Julie trek towards the Meadow. PHOTO
BY
PAUL
WELLS.

Setting up camp en route to the Meadow, Keith and Julie standing by their tent in the foreground. PHOTO
BY
PAUL
WELLS.

Hans Christian Ostrø being made up as his character Bima for his
kathakali
dance graduation show in Sreekrishnapuram, May 1995. Ostrø spent five months training to be a
kathakali
master in southern India before travelling to Kashmir in June 1995.

Hans Christian Ostrø on board
Montana
houseboat, Dal Lake, Srinagar, where he stayed shortly before he was kidnapped.

The Heeven Hotel in Pahalgam. Kashmiri police alleged that ‘Sikander’, al Faran’s commander, was sheltered here, unbeknown to the hotel’s owners.

The wives and girlfriends of the kidnapped men leaving the first press conference at the Welcome Hotel in Srinagar on 13 July 1995. (Left to right) Cath, Jane Schelly (wife of Don Hutchings), Julie, Anne Henning (girlfriend of Dirk Hasert). An unidentified diplomatic liaison officer accompanies them.

Rajinder Tikoo, Inspector General of Crime Branch at the time of the kidnappings.

Members of the al Faran kidnap party.

One of the first hostage photographs taken by al Faran. It was shot outside the herders’ hut from which American hostage John Childs had escaped in the early hours of 8 July 1995. The remaining three original hostages (left to right) Don, Keith and Paul are flanked by new hostages Dirk Hasert (left) and Hans Christian Ostrø (right), both seized on 8 July. The photograph was delivered to reporters in Srinagar on 12 July.