by Adrian Levy
By the time they reached Pahalgam at around 2 p.m., after six hours’ trekking, they were tired and footsore. More than fifty people were now in their party, a motley caravan of ponies, heavily laden trekkers, worried guides and hennaed village elders who filed solemnly down the main street, past the empty trekking agencies, bakery and souvenir shops, the mouldering craft emporiums and general stores, with their bright strips of bunting made of multi-coloured crisp bags that crunched and rustled in the breeze. Many shop owners pulled down their shutters, seemingly anticipating what was to come.
The centre of town was already in an uproar, news of the abductions having come from Khurram Parvez and his friends. The kidnapping of a local for money was so regular an occurrence these days that it barely raised an eyebrow. But meddling with foreigners’ lives broke the unspoken code of Kashmir. Whatever people’s private thoughts about the beliefs and behaviour of those who came here from abroad, foreigners were the valley’s bread and butter, and seizing four of them was unthinkable. The large group of loud Westerners drew nervous crowds, while taxi drivers, desperate for trade, tried to secure fares down to Srinagar, and hotel agents attempted to block-book their rooms. ‘It was bedlam,’ recalled Jane.
She, Julie and Cath pushed their way into a phone booth, only to find that the line was down. They found another which was working, and as a dozen faces pressed against the glass outside she rang the US Embassy in New Delhi. Two American citizens had been abducted, she tried to explain calmly on a line that echoed and whined. She gave their names and Don’s passport details, and said that her brother-in-law Donald Snyder, a Republican member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, could be called upon to help. She said the only thing she knew about the other American man who had been seized was his name: John Childs. Next, they phoned the British High Commission, and relayed a similar message: armed Islamic militants had kidnapped two Britons and were demanding the release of jailed activists. The phone line seemed to howl in sympathy. The officials appeared to understand through the static, and said they would put their emergency protocols into action, dispatching representatives by the next available flight, which would not be until the morning. It was imperative that the women report the abductions to the local police, they were advised, and file an FIR, a First Information Report, officially registering the incident. That way a criminal inquiry would have to commence immediately. Then they should head, quickly, to the sanctuary of the United Nations office in Srinagar.
Jane asked if she could be alone, and made the hardest calls of her life. Fearing she would finally break down, she rang her parents, Joyce and James, in Orefield, Pennsylvania, and, knowing the news would terrify them, told them calmly and methodically where she was and what had happened. She then called her older sister Nancy, and asked to speak to her brother-in-law, Donald. He promised to get straight on to the US State Department. Finally she called her husband’s family in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. Struggling to understand, they were horrified.
Afterwards, gasping for air, Jane went outside while Julie rang her mother in Middlesbrough and Keith’s parents, Charlie and Mavis. Hearing Julie’s distant voice calling, ‘Mavis, Mavis, is that you?’ Keith’s mother knew something was wrong. Where was the usual joke – ‘Hello, Mrs Mangan, it’s Mrs Mangan here’? Julie explained how Keith had been kidnapped by ‘Kashmiri rebels’, along with another Brit and two Americans. The four men had been taken off somewhere into the mountains, and the rebels had issued a note demanding the release of twenty-one prisoners. It was a confused, rambling story, and Mavis struggled to keep up. Putting the phone down, she turned to her husband and cried.
Lastly, it was Cath’s turn to ring her family in Norwich and Paul’s parents in Blackburn. Bob was stunned when he took the call: ‘What the hell am I going to tell Dianne?’ She had been against this trip from the start. ‘I thought it was the worst day of my life,’ says Bob. ‘But it was just the beginning.’
Pahalgam police station, a brick-and-plaster building with a curling tin roof, nowadays ringed with sandbags, sentries and coils of razor wire, lay at the split in the road just north of the bus station, where the Lidderwat Valley route peeled off to the north-west and the East Lidder River road headed north-east to Amarnath. It was thronged with constables and clerks when Jane, Julie and Cath arrived to file their FIR at around 3 p.m., accompanied by several other trekkers from the Meadow who wanted to report the theft of their money and possessions. They fought their way inside, passing a morbid tableau of photographs of corpses, each one an unidentified victim of the conflict or of some mountain misfortune whose body had been recovered, each one an unexplained tragedy. Unsure what to do with the Western party, a constable ushered them into a small, humid ante-room filled with mismatched chairs. On the table lay a couple of the previous day’s newspapers, carrying excerpts of a speech by Frank Wisner, the American Ambassador in New Delhi, to mark Independence Day. ‘I can think of no better way to celebrate our own Independence Day than to reaffirm the commitment of the US to a long-term relationship with India that will serve our common interests and protect our common ideals,’ he was quoted as saying.
After some time Jane, Julie and Cath were shown into the Deputy Superintendent’s office, with constables, head constables and sub-inspectors squeezing in behind them. By this stage Jane was ‘feeling physically ill’. Someone was dispatched to find the tea-boy and buy some girda bread before the proceedings could begin. The women only wanted to get on with filing their report. ‘Wait, wait,’ the policemen responded, trying to be hospitable, coaxing a fan into life by poking bare wires into an electric socket. ‘I remember as many people looking on as could possibly fit in,’ says Jane. Noticing the jumble of dusty files piled up on shelves behind the Deputy Superintendent’s desk, she wondered if their FIR would end up there, unread and unactioned.
Eventually the women were informed that the Deputy Superintendent, the senior officer responsible for Pahalgam police station, was ‘not available’. Where was he, Jane asked. ‘Out of station,’ said someone unhelpfully. They were told that a Duty Inspector would take down their story instead. His belly flopping over the bright silver buckle of his police-issue belt, the officer entered the room and, without looking at the women seated before him, began talking in Kashmiri to the assembly of constables. Some of them laughed and joked. One of the women asked what was going on. Shuffling papers in his logbook, the Inspector ignored her. Jane felt her frustration welling up again. All these minutes wasted gave the kidnappers another half-mile up into the mountains. Why could they get no one’s attention? Julie wanted to scream, ‘Men’s lives are hanging by a thread! Can someone please just take some notes?’ All over the station phones began trilling as news of the kidnappings spread across the police network. No one answered them. A constant stream of men brought files and bits of paper for the Inspector to sign. ‘I was in such a stupor I have no idea of his name,’ Jane says, ‘but I do remember lots of carbon paper.’
The women tried to be as helpful as they could. The Inspector eventually began, taking down their names (spelt wrongly) and details of their itinerary to date (mangled), confirming locations and trekking routes on a large hand-drawn map of the area on the wall. To the accompaniment of constant mutterings from the gathered mass of junior ranks, he asked about their guides, who had melted away the moment the women had entered the police station, except for Dasheer, who was being restrained in another room. Jane had made up her mind that Bashir and Sultan were innocent of any involvement, and her suspicions had turned instead to the itinerant herders they had met on the paths: ‘There had been lots of gujjars, bakarwals and locals moving about.’ Ignoring her, the Inspector issued orders to bring the guides and pony-wallahs in for interrogation. Looking at him, Jane feared for them.
Finally, the Inspector asked about the kidnappers. ‘Julie, who was very artful, drew sketches of many of them,’ says Jane. ‘We turned these over to the Kashmiri police, but later on nobody was able to find the
m again.’ She had been thinking as if this was Crimewatch, on which an identikit picture might help crack the case, rather than Kashmir, where the insurgents were so numerous that few files were kept on any of them, only thousands of photos of mutilated corpses that were displayed in a morbid black museum at the headquarters of the Rashtriya Rifles, images the army used to propel new recruits into battle and to show off to visiting politicians from New Delhi.
It was only when Jane disclosed that she had a handwritten note from the kidnappers that the babble quietened. Tangible evidence. The women were taken off to a larger room, with benches pushed against one wall on which sat rows of unopened files. ‘Please show me the note,’ the Inspector demanded. Jane was reluctant, having seen him scrunch Julie’s sketches into a drawer. In any case, it was addressed to ‘the American Government’. He insisted, and grabbing it, zeroed in on the demands, especially the list of twenty-one prisoners.
His finger hovered over the name ‘Masood Azhar’, and he raised an eyebrow. The Afghani too. A dry cough. Then he found Langrial, the warrior revered by Pakistani jihadis as ‘Darwesh’. He glanced at Jane, and asked if she knew anything about these men. She shook her head. They were all main players in the Movement, he said, adding that it was a Pakistan-backed militant group, as he saw that they did not understand him. Masood Azhar was the outfit’s chief ideologue, he thought, and had been captured in Kashmir the previous winter. India would never give him up. Did they realise this was an exceptionally serious situation? Growing desperate, Jane pointed out that the letter had been signed ‘al Faran’. The Inspector shrugged, saying he had never heard of it.
The Inspector turned on her. What had they been doing up there? Didn’t they know the mountains were crawling with militants? This was the second kidnapping they’d had to deal with in a year. Jane could not believe what she was hearing. Why hadn’t they been warned by the tourist police, government officials, the guides, the pony-wallahs, the soldiers who had waved to them, or the local police who had seen them leave? What did he mean by ‘the second kidnapping’? The Inspector frowned before explaining that the previous one had involved ‘a pair of Britishers’, but it had worked out all right. It had taken place in June 1994, near Aru, and the two foreigners involved had been released unharmed. He couldn’t remember their names, but he was sure Masood Azhar’s outfit had also been behind that episode.
The situation was even worse than the women had thought. An unknown militant group was demanding the release of twenty-one Muslim terrorists, men that India would never hand over. Nothing in Jane’s well-ordered world had prepared her for something of this magnitude, or the double talk and deception that had got her here. She needed Don and his legal pad. She wanted to get out of this stifling office and away from this Inspector who gave the impression of not caring about her husband or the other three hostages. Extracting the kidnappers’ letter, along with an inky copy of the FIR, the women hailed a ride to Srinagar.
As they drove back down a road she had never expected to see again, passing the Aishmuqam shrine before turning onto National Highway 1A at Anantnag, Jane was numb. If things had gone to plan, she and Don would have been back in Srinagar by now, shopping and relaxing, having left the mountains via the village of Sumbal. ‘Later on, I drove by car past where that valley meets the road, and was heartsick knowing that we might have exited there,’ she recalled. ‘I really could have just cried.’ Instead, she was sitting in a taxi with two British women she barely knew, but whose lives had become inextricably linked with hers by the events of the past twenty-four hours.
It was dark by the time they got to the city, and the Pahalgam taxi driver had trouble locating the office of the United Nations Military Observer Group for India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), which the women had been advised to head for. Since 1949, UN observers had maintained a low-key presence in Srinagar, supposedly monitoring the Line of Control, the ceasefire line between India and Pakistan. But most of the time they were not permitted even to leave their office, a Raj-era blue-and-white mansion, ringed by high fences and chinar trees, that resembled a British sahib’s summer residence.
Inside, the UN staff made it clear that getting tangled up with the kidnapping was the last thing they needed. Their presence in Kashmir was already on a knife-edge. The chief said the women could stay at the local UN guesthouse for two days only. He explained that the previous year he had been involved in negotiations for the release of Kim Housego and David Mackie, an episode that had tarred UNMOGIP’s relations with New Delhi for months after. They could not afford a repeat of the situation. ‘Everyone seemed to know about this previous kidnapping except us,’ Jane thought as they headed off to the guesthouse.
By midnight on 5 July there had been no further word from the kidnappers, and nothing of consequence from the Indian authorities either, although at the UN compound the women had at least been able to use a satellite phone to update their families. ‘Julie just cried and cried,’ recalled her mother Anita Sullivan. In Blackburn, Paul’s father Bob was threatening to get straight on a plane and ‘march into the mountains myself’.
No one slept well that night. Jane stayed up late, doing what she always did in an emergency: the debrief. She wrote down every detail, lest she forgot a crucial snippet of information, banishing any feelings of regret the moment they crept into her mind: ‘It was a very uncertain time. We hadn’t been informed about how the Indians intended to respond to the kidnapping, although we hoped that they would do their best to secure the release of our loved ones as quickly as they could.’ Julie lay awake too, haunted by those grimy bearded faces, the guns that smelled of cold tar and grease, Keith walking off into the rain. Cath could not get to grips with the hell her holiday had become, and regretted ever agreeing to the plan.
By the time they woke up the next morning, exhausted and frightened of what the day would bring, a large pack of Kashmiri photographers and journalists had massed at the guesthouse entrance, and pictures of Don, Keith and Paul were being splashed across the world. In Middlesbrough, the headline in the local paper read: ‘KIDNAPPED: Rebels Seize Tourists on Dream Trip’. Mavis and Charlie Mangan were photographed sitting on the sofa in their front room, and the paper had got hold of a picture of Julie and Keith taken on the day of their leaving party, both of them grinning from ear to ear, arms wrapped around each other. ‘Julie rang from Kashmir last night in total shock,’ Mavis told a reporter. ‘I wanted to jump on the first plane out there, but I couldn’t do anything. We don’t know much about these kidnappers, only that they are Kashmiri rebels.’ Charlie added, ‘I didn’t want him to go out there because of the dangers, but this is what he wanted to do.’
The paper reported that Philip Barton, from the British High Commission in New Delhi, was now in Srinagar, ‘giving assistance to the Indian authorities’. A High Commission spokesman said Barton would be ‘taking what action he can’, but that the tourists should not have been trekking anywhere near Pahalgam: ‘It is a particularly dangerous area because of previous kidnappings. We have advised tourists not to travel there and that has been our policy for some time.’ There was also an ominous-sounding comment from a Foreign Office spokesman: ‘We will do what we can.’ The families, who had been actively assured by everyone that it was safe to travel to the region, bristled.
The women’s mood lifted a little when they heard that the embassies’ representatives had arrived. Then two young diplomats walked in, looking significantly younger than them, thought Julie and Jane. Philip Barton, a thirty-one-year-old political officer, recently posted from Venezuela, told Julie and Cath that he had been to Kashmir a few times. But he had limited contacts, due to the restrictions the Indian government placed on foreign diplomats visiting the region. Taking the two British women to one side, he assured them that the Foreign Office would do all it could. It was already talking to Scotland Yard’s specialist hostage-negotiation team, and the Indians had promised the British that ‘a massive search was under way’. He seemed keen to keep
the Indians happy, impressing on Julie and Cath the need to say as little as possible about the kidnapping to the media. The more publicity was given to the incident, the more the kidnappers would be convinced their captives were valuable, and the harder they would bargain before releasing them.
What had they been doing in the mountains, Barton asked gently. Had they not seen the warnings about Pahalgam, which was considered to be particularly dangerous because of the previous kidnapping and ongoing militant activities? For some time the Foreign Office had been advising tourists not to travel there. Crying, Cath and Julie explained that Indian officials had told them the opposite. Barton, sensing a clash of opinions, backed off. Instead, he went off in search of a secure phone line.
Tim Buchs, a Second Secretary at the US Embassy, seemed unsure too, according to Jane. He had only recently arrived in India, and this was only his second visit to Kashmir. The first had been the previous month, when he had helped organise the Pahalgam fishing trip for Ambassador Frank Wisner. It had turned into something of a catastrophe, he admitted, with Kashmiris reacting testily to Wisner’s much-publicised and ill-advised claim that the valley was ‘tired’ of the militancy. Buchs had learned from that experience that nothing said or done in Kashmir was inconsequential. Jane sensed that this unhappy experience would determine Buchs’ and the other diplomats’ actions now: ‘I don’t know if all the decisions they made were right or wrong. I constantly think of all the things I might have done differently, and only wish I knew then what I know now. It’s easy to find fault, to blame and second-guess.’