by Adrian Levy
Kashmiri reporters had a precarious relationship with the law. Hindu officers, and many of the senior Muslim higher-ups, viewed them as either untrustworthy or as spies for militant outfits. They were typically characterised as propagandists, hecklers and agitators, whipping up hysteria in the valley with their unhelpful reports on police massacres, brutal army crackdowns and bloody cordon-and-search operations. But then, the police, whose ranks were dominated by Kashmiri Muslims except among the top tier – the Director General was invariably a Hindu, a New Delhi appointee – had their own problems: hated by the local population for being in the pay of New Delhi, and viewed as untrustworthy by other parts of the security apparatus, including the army, that were more firmly tethered to India.
Journalists like Yusuf, attached to one of the world’s most prestigious international broadcasters, occupied an awkward spot somewhere in the middle. He needed his police contacts, and there were many senior officers in the force who wanted to be heard, either ‘on the record’ or anonymously, for whom the BBC provided an incomparable platform. Among them was DSP Kifayat Haider at Bijbehara, a close contact Yusuf respected, and who he guessed would be at the centre of things right now. But today Haider was tight-lipped and in a strange mood. He claimed it was the combined stress of the yatra, his ongoing investigation of the bombing at Pahalgam bus station and the pressure of keeping a lid on the vicious response of the RSS: ‘He told me he feared the entire shooting match might go up in flames.’ ‘Talk to Crime Branch,’ Haider had suggested, bitterly referring to the team that had been sent up to Pahalgam by police headquarters, which he worried was deliberately undermining his role. There it was, out of the bag: a turf war between a good local officer like Haider and the specialists from Srinagar who had been drafted in over his head.
These days Crime Branch, which took responsibility for all non-militancy-related wrongdoings in the valley, was under the control of Rajinder Tikoo, a corpulent, philosophical Inspector General who Yusuf liked. Until the previous February, Tikoo had been IG of Kashmir Zone, the most senior operational officer in the valley, and had had dealings with the press on a daily basis. ‘IG Tikoo was his own man, someone who knew everything but told only what he wanted to,’ says Yusuf. Tikoo had a reputation for being articulate, irreverent and tricky, but Yusuf was hopeful that on this occasion he might be forthcoming. The IG took the journalist’s call straight away, but said little of substance. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing I can say to you, Jameel Sahib,’ he said, adding cryptically, ‘Try elsewhere.’
Yusuf thought he knew what Tikoo meant. He was referring to his opposite number in the CID, Gopal Sharma, the valley’s police intelligence chief. Sharma had risen unobtrusively through the ranks. He had influence and information, but he was regarded as ‘a model of discretion’, rarely entertaining the press pack. It came as no surprise when he politely refused to speak to Yusuf.
Moving down his contact list, Yusuf tried the usual slack-lipped deputy and assistant superintendents dotted around the valley. But they were also unforthcoming, leaving Yusuf to conclude that everyone’s silence had been ordered. The whole valley was bottled up, it seemed, including the militants, who were also saying nothing.
He contemplated the photographs on his wall: Sikander, the Afghani and the Turk, taken by his friend Mushtaq Ali. Was Sikander sitting up there in the mountains in some gujjar hut with the hostages? Or hiding with them in a safe house in the heart of Anantnag town? Frustrated, Yusuf contemplated calling the Governor’s Security Advisor, General Saklani. But Saklani, Yusuf concluded, was all about control, and was unlikely to take some theories for a spin.
The army? Under normal circumstances, the army and its allies spoke to no one apart from their own kind, unless it was to threaten, chastise or clarify. And at the moment the army was a problem for Yusuf especially. Just two months back he had been given a vicious dressing down by the military over one of his reports about Charar-e-Sharief, the wooden shrine town that had gone up in smoke. The army was furious that he had repeated claims by residents that it was they who had burned it down, although Yusuf had even-handedly reported the army’s rejoinder that the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Mast Gul, holed up inside the shrine, was actually responsible. Unfortunately for Yusuf, the BBC editor who had cobbled the package together before it was broadcast in London had erroneously illustrated it with footage from another country altogether, showing Muslims under attack in Bosnia. It was a lazy mistake, but in the eyes of a paranoid Indian Army it looked as if the BBC was propagandising, leaving Yusuf exposed. The BBC bureau in New Delhi was warned by an anonymous caller that their man in Kashmir was in serious trouble.
But this morning, sitting with his Lipton chai, Yusuf placed that threat in a mental drawer alongside the others, preferring to focus on the present situation. Without any help from the police or the army, he would do what all good journalists did to drum up information: take in the wider scene. He would concentrate on tracking down where Hans Christian Ostrø had stayed when he first arrived in Kashmir, ringing everyone he could think of in the trekking areas with a working phone line. Who had accompanied Ostrø? Yusuf had picked up the scent of what John Childs and Jane Schelly also suspected, that pretty much everyone in the Lidderwat Valley had known that the Movement was on the lookout for Western hostages on the afternoon of 8 July. Had a casual acquaintance of Ostrø’s given details to the kidnap team? Had Ostrø also been set up?
After a few calls, Yusuf discovered from sources in the tourism office that the Norwegian had spent his first couple of days in Kashmir on the Montana houseboat, one of the hundreds of floating hotels moored in Dal Lake. Taking a shikara out over the water, Yusuf tracked down Abdul Rashid Mir, the Montana’s owner, who was clearly terrified of the consequences of being wrapped up in a kidnapping, having heard from relatives in Pahalgam that all the pony-wallahs and guides who had been hired by the unfortunate trekkers were now undergoing intense questioning.
Eventually Yusuf coaxed Mir into talking. He confirmed that he had picked Ostrø up at Srinagar airport on 28 June, two days after Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had arrived, a week after Julie and Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley, and two days before John Childs. Ostrø and Mir had got chatting that night on the houseboat, Ostrø telling him how shocked he was at the security presence in the valley, and asking about the conflict in the region. Over cups of sweet khawa, green tea flavoured with saffron, almonds and cardamom, they had discussed Kashmir’s recent history, Ostrø noting some of it down in a black notebook that Mir remembered he carried everywhere. The houseboat owner quickly realised Ostrø wasn’t like other tourists. Likeable and energetic, he wanted to know everything and anything about the people he was living with. ‘He was never bored,’ Mir recalled.
In turn, Ostrø had regaled Mir’s family with stories from home, telling them he had come to India after a gruelling stint in military service and the breakup of his marriage, and that the light in Kashmir reminded him of the far north of Norway. He played with Mir’s children, telling them Norwegian fairy tales. He asked Mir to take photographs of him in the regal surroundings of the houseboat, pictures that were later processed by the Kashmiri police after the film was recovered from Ostrø’s abandoned tent. In one, taken in the Montana’s intricately carved sitting room, dominated by a vast copper samovar, Ostrø sits on a sofa, dressed in a cream cotton shirt unbuttoned to the navel, looking relaxed and bronzed. He had grown a beard, and wrote in his notebook that he was thankful the necessity of remaining clean-shaven for his kathakali make-up was over. Ostrø also took pictures of Mir and his family in the functional portion of the boat where they lived, Mir smoking and looking pinch-faced with his young wife and two children beside him on the mattresses where they slept on the floor. Today the pictures are in an album kept by Hans Christian’s mother Marit Hesby, along with her son’s last letters and postcards.
The houseboat owner was disappointed when Ostrø announced two days after arriving that he was leaving
for Amarnath, alone. Mir had tried to talk him into taking a guide, concerned about the commission he would be losing – and a little worried that this ‘likeable but naïve’ foreigner would get into trouble. But the Norwegian was firm. ‘I have my knife,’ he laughed, waving his army-issue bayonet. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Ostrø had also made some checks, visiting the Indian government tourism offices in New Delhi and the J&K tourist office in Srinagar, where a tourist policeman had done his best to sell him the services of a guide. He showed Mir the officer’s card: Nasser Ahmed Jan. ‘Call me if you have any trouble,’ Jan had said, as he did to everyone, handing him the business card. Mir said the same as Ostrø boarded the Pahalgam bus. ‘I told him, “Good luck. Make sure to come and stay with us on the way back down.”’
Ostrø arrived in Pahalgam on 1 July, the same day as John Childs. The next morning Childs, Ostrø and the party consisting of Julie and Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley had separately trekked up to the Meadow, all of them leaving at different times and camping in different locations. The photographs recovered from Ostrø’s unprocessed film showed several mountain beauty spots where he had stopped en route.
Childs had headed to Kolahoi on 3 July, as Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had set out north-west for Tar Sar, while as far as Yusuf could establish, Ostrø had returned to Pahalgam, meaning that he was lucky enough to be out of the Meadow when the kidnappers struck the following evening. In Pahalgam he had stayed at the Lidder Palace, a wooden hotel overlooking the town’s golf course beside the East Lidder River. Its owner, Yaqoob Sheikh, had rented the foreigner a tent, keeping his Air India ticket for London as a guarantee that he would return it in a fortnight’s time. Sheikh also tried to rent him a guide, but he had refused, saying he wanted to be alone. He spent most of the following day, 4 July, writing postcards to his family and wandering around Pahalgam taking snaps, coming back at around 10 p.m., a few hours after events unfolded in the Meadow.
The next morning, 5 July, Ostrø had woken at 6 a.m., according to Sheikh, and left Pahalgam by seven, saying he was eager to reach the heights above Chandanwari. He had taken a ride in a jeep taxi part of the way up the East Lidder River route, a journey he also photographed; the films were eventually handed over to DSP Haider, who later gave them to Ostrø’s family. What this told Yusuf was that Ostrø had gone from being charmed to becoming the most unlucky hostage of all. If he had stayed just a little longer in Pahalgam, or had overslept that morning, he would have witnessed the emotional arrival of Jane, Julie and Cath in the town to report the kidnappings in the Meadow. In his eagerness to get into the mountains, he had missed them by a few crucial hours.
On the evening of 5 July Ostrø had pitched camp in the countryside outside Chandanwari. He left the next day before 7 a.m., heading for Sheshnag. He had stopped off for tea in remote Zargibal, to and from which no news travelled fast, and where no one would hear about the kidnappings for days to come. Zargibal was in a different time zone, villagers joked: clocks there were set forty-eight hours behind those elsewhere in the valley. ‘It was a second stroke of bad luck for Hans Christian Ostrø that he had not pressed on to Amarnath as originally planned,’ says Yusuf. Ostrø had stopped to make friends, settled a while, and then, like Don, Keith, John, Paul and Dirk, had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
12 July, 11 a.m. Yusuf pored over a trekking map of the Kashmiri Himalayas, trying to work out how far the kidnappers and their hostages might have got in the last four days. In the absence of police intelligence, everyone in the Press Enclave was doing the same, working on the assumption that the main kidnap party could not have been far away when Dirk Hasert and Hans Christian Ostrø were seized between Chandanwari and Zargibal on 8 July. If they had set out at full pelt from the heights above Zargibal on the afternoon of 8 July, as soon as Ostrø had been captured, walking and climbing a maximum of ten miles a day, they could be anywhere within a forty-mile radius by now. That gave searchers a circle whose diameter was eighty miles long, which meant covering an area of five thousand square miles – if anybody was actually searching.
Just as Yusuf was contemplating the difficulty in finding the hostages, and the necessity of a negotiated settlement with al Faran, the phone rang: ‘Vaaray chivaa.’ He jumped, recognising the southern burr instantly, took a deep breath, and kicked the door shut. Sikander. The message was brief: a packet was coming. The usual drop-off. Then the phone went dead. Yusuf sent Farooq Khan, a Kashmir Times photographer, out to do the collection. Several hours later he returned to the Press Enclave clutching a manila envelope. It had been deposited by the wayside from a passing motorbike at a busy crossroads opposite Jamia Masjid, the most important mosque in Srinagar. These days, anonymous drop-offs were considered by the militants to be far safer than a traceable phone call or a meeting. For now, it looked as if the Press Enclave was ahead of the Jammu and Kashmir Police.
Yusuf ripped open the envelope. Inside were two almost identical photos. The first, in colour, showed Don, Keith and Paul, their hands looped together with flimsy-looking twine, making their detention appear a symbolic affair. The twine’s ends were loosely held by heavily armed militants, whose faces had been scratched out, although their figures were clearly visible, giving away some identifiable clues: a woolly Afghan pakul cap, bodies swathed in blankets worn over kurta pyjamas, suggesting that they were somewhere high and windy. Their wild, straggly hair and uncombed beards harked back to the days of the Afghan mujahideen, givng the entire composition a theatrical rather than a menacing air.
Keith Mangan sat at the centre of the group, showing a week’s worth of stubble and still wearing his wife’s purple bomber jacket. To his left was Paul Wells, his long hair hanging loosely around his shoulders. After more than a week of trudging, sleeping rough and bad food, there was no mistaking his look of resignation: this was no longer a game. To the right of Keith was Don Hutchings in his trademark blue fleecy hat and Gore-Tex trousers, looking drawn and tired. Was he still chacha (uncle), Yusuf wondered as he pondered these by-now familiar faces, or were the stresses and strains of their continued incarceration since John Childs’ midnight flit beginning to grate on them all? The three of them sat on a bench against the dry-stone wall of a dhoka, staring placidly, putting up with being posed for a photograph probably taken with one of their own cameras.
The second photo showed the same dhoka and the same rope trick, but this time two new hostages had been squeezed into the line-up: Dirk Hasert, in a white sweatshirt, loose trousers and walking boots, at one end, his hair shorn, a modest goatee beard, his head tilted slightly to the right; at the other end, Hans Christian Ostrø wearing a white-and-purple batik shirt he had bought in New Delhi, his expression irritable, as if he was still coming to terms with being roughly handled in Zargibal.
Yusuf could only draw one conclusion, which was confirmed many years later by John Childs when he studied these pictures together for the first time. They had probably been taken on the same crucial day, 8 July, the first being snapped on the morning of John’s escape, and the second after the search party had returned later from Chandanwari and Zargibal, with two new captives to replace the one who had slipped away. ‘I could almost hear the kidnappers talking when I saw the second picture,’ John said. ‘“We lost one, but never mind, we got two more.”’ The pictures also gave a glimpse into what had been unfolding up in the mountains. Yusuf reasoned that the dhoka in the photos must have been the one from which John fled. Don, Keith and Paul must have sat there all day, waiting for the search party to return, unsure of their fate. It was a crucial piece of evidence. Armed with this picture, John Childs could possibly lead a search party back to the location, or identify it from a helicopter. There were many such huts on the mountains, but given what was known about the likely route taken by the kidnappers, searchers could whittle them down if they got a move on.
Yusuf pressed his contacts to find out where John Childs was. The information that came back shocked him: Childs was on his way bac
k to the US. Yusuf and the other journalists could not believe it. Knowing nothing of John’s repeated attempts to get an army search team up into the mountains within minutes of his being rescued, the local journalists simply concluded, like many others involved in the drama, that the American could not wait to return to his loved ones. And John, being John, kept his mouth shut: ‘I just ran away from all the journalists. I did not want to tell my story, or how I was pushed out of town despite asking to be taken back into the mountains.’
One of the few still in Srinagar who knew the truth was Saklani’s police liaison, Altaf Ahmed, who later claimed that he and Saklani had wanted to go along with Childs’ plan as soon as they rescued him from the ridge above Pissu Top. ‘We all said, “Let’s go over the hills to find the location of the others,”’ he said many years later. ‘But as soon as we got Childs back to Srinagar, a woman from the American Embassy arrived and made it very clear that they were taking him out. “We’re leaving in twenty-four hours,” she told us. And we had no choice about it.’ To Yusuf, it didn’t really matter whose version was right. The plain fact was that the only living link to the remaining hostages was gone.
As well as the two photographs, there was a note inside Sikander’s envelope that rammed this point home. Signed ‘al Faran’, for which Yusuf read the Movement, it stated that the five hostages would be killed in the next thirty-six hours if the Indian government failed to release the twenty-one militants listed on the scrap of paper that had been handed to Jane Schelly on 5 July. Reading the message, Yusuf was reminded of a similar demand he had seen back in June 1994, after Kim Housego and David Mackie had been seized. But this time the language was more aggressive, with the kidnappers directly threatening to kill the hostages. Did this reflect pressure on Sikander to make things work, second time around? Yusuf was worried about this confrontational stance. New Delhi did not deal with confrontation well, and there seemed little room to manoeuvre. However, he was a journalist, and this was a big story. He had to stop worrying and get on with his job, preparing a report based on this letter drop – and then wait for the fallout.