The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  On the afternoon of 13 August, in the Welcome Hotel in Srinagar, Tore Hattrem was sitting and reading. It was his week on as the duty liaison officer representing the relatives’ interests now the families were down in New Delhi. In recent days the British High Commission and the American, German and Norwegian embassies had organised themselves into a more manageable group they called the ‘G4’, in an attempt to simplify and coordinate arrangements between the four nations whose subjects were involved in the kidnapping. ‘Someone called to say a body had been found,’ Tore recalled. ‘A car was waiting to take me to Badami Bagh, the army HQ.’ He would have to inform the G4 straight away, and he was told that General Saklani was preparing to call an emergency meeting of the Indian security forces’ Unified Command.

  At the military hospital, dozens of worried-looking officials, some of them in uniform, were milling around. Silence descended as the Norwegian diplomat entered, and they parted to allow him through. The sight of Ostrø’s mutilated corpse on a gurney in the mortuary room, his head lying between his thighs, made Tore retch. It was the first time he had ever seen a dead body, and the fact that it was someone he knew made it all the worse. ‘It was terrible. Sad. I barely recognised him as the young man who’d come into our Embassy. Blood was spattered across his face, as if he’d been in a battle. Only one boot had been found, which everyone was puzzling over.’

  A few days previously, when all of the hostages had been alive, the kidnappers had sent a new set of photos to the Press Enclave in Srinagar. The pack comprised single shots of each hostage sitting on the same metal chair against the wooden wall of what looked like a sizeable village house, as if they were in a macabre passport photo studio. At the time much had been made of the fact that Hans Christian was wearing only one sock – his family had hoped that this was some kind of secret sign. Looking now at an army doctor examining the body’s blistered right foot, Tore was more inclined to believe the rumour that after John Childs’ escape the other hostages had been punished by having their footwear removed.

  After identifying the body, Tore was shown the note that had been found pinned to Hans Christian’s shirt and the roll of papers that had been hidden in his underwear. Could he translate the hidden writings, asked a policeman impatiently. Tore flicked through the sheets of paper. ‘There were so many things to read, letters to family members, poems, stories.’ He translated a few passages as the policeman, whose nametag read ‘Kifayat Haider’, stood agitated at his elbow. ‘He wanted to know what all of it meant immediately. I guess they were hoping to find clues about the kidnappers’ location. But I found it very hard to decipher what Hans Christian was saying. I told them I would need some time to do it. And I felt that I really should not be reading these private letters.’

  But Haider was insistent, and he wanted Tore to get started immediately. ‘I could see there was a high level of anger and frustration on the part of the writer, and that he seemed to be reflecting on his own death,’ Tore said, but he told Haider he was not going to translate any more: ‘This was a job that needed to be done properly, and respectfully, and not standing around a gurney.’ Another officer, his nametag identifying him as DSP Gupta from CID, entered the room, and Haider blanched. Gupta stretched out his hand and asked Haider for the paperwork.

  Tore had spotted a letter, presumably from Paul Wells, addressed to Catherine Moseley, and tried to get it back too so he could pass it on. ‘Not yet,’ Gupta said, taking everything, then hustling Haider out of the room and into a neighbouring office, from where Tore overheard a furious row. ‘You didn’t tell me he was in the army!’ Haider shouted at Gupta. ‘He had a bayonet, Norwegian army issue. Some of his clothing too. Why was he here? Was he in intelligence, and was that connected to his death?’ Gupta tried to shut Haider up, telling him he was ‘out of his depth’. Gupta had come to do his job and take photographs of the corpse, particularly the Arabic inscription on the chest. It was not for him to explain to Haider why CID was ‘taking complete charge of the case’. He now raised his voice too: ‘Just let it go! This is a CID matter.’

  Tore predicted that there would be a tussle for control of the remains of Hans Christian Ostrø too. Who would have jurisdiction over his death? ‘We wanted a formal post mortem conducted by one of the Embassy doctors,’ Tore said, but the Indian authorities reserved the right to take the lead. After twelve hours the body was released with the issue unresolved, but an agreement to get it to New Delhi, where the next stage would be decided. ‘We removed Hans Christian’s clothes, put him on ice in the coffin and had him flown to New Delhi on a military flight.’

  Anette tried to keep the details of Hans Christian’s death from her mother: ‘I didn’t think she would be able to take it.’ But some Indian newspapers ran the ghoulish picture snatched at Anantnag police station. The matted hair and the blood spatters told the whole story, as did his parted lips, locked open in an oval of surprise. One Kashmiri newspaper reported that a family living near Seer had seen Hans Christian on the evening before he was killed. ‘Militants came with him for food,’ said the villager. ‘The foreigner would not eat, but he drank some milk. When they left, they took a rope with them.’

  When Marit saw the photos and reports, her first thoughts were for her ageing father, sitting alone at home in Norway, watching developments on television. Hans Christian had been his favourite grandson, and she couldn’t allow him to find out that way. Ole Hesby was delighted to hear his daughter’s voice when she reached him later that day. ‘He said, “Oh, you’re in India, how lovely, what news of Hans Christian?” And then I had to tell him. It was the hardest call I ever made.’

  Hans Christian Ostrø’s simple wooden coffin arrived in the Indian capital on 14 August, two weeks after he was supposed to have flown home. His parents could not face the formal identification, so Marit’s husband John, who had come to India to support her, stepped in. He arrived at the airport to meet the flight from Srinagar only to find ‘journalists crowded around the casket. We couldn’t get anywhere near.’ Pushing through the crowds, Tore Hattrem identified himself and told John to rendezvous with them at a military hospital. For the rest of that afternoon they played cat and mouse with the Indian press pack. ‘Three times they tried to identify the body,’ Marit recalled. ‘But each time the press burst into the room to get a picture.’ Eventually the coffin was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in south New Delhi, where an argument broke out over who should conduct the post mortem.

  The Indian government insisted its medics should preside, since Hans Christian had been killed on Indian soil, and the crime was being investigated there. The G4 weakly argued that as the victim was a foreigner, they should lead. It was decided that Indian doctors would start things off, observed by representatives of the G4. But, enraged by what they saw as the patronising attitude of the Western diplomats, the Indian team tried to shut the foreigners out anyway. ‘We met with considerable obstruction and disinformation during the course of the day,’ wrote Dr Andrew Reekie, a British High Commission doctor who had been delegated to watch proceedings. ‘Every effort was made initially to bar me.’

  The post mortem eventually began at 5.30 p.m. on 14 August, with Dr Reekie and an unidentified FBI medic observing. ‘Externally, the decapitated body was well nourished and showed no signs of neglect or of torture,’ Reekie wrote. ‘There were ante-mortem minor abrasions to the knuckles of both hands and a possible minor bruise to one of his calves. Apart from the extensive damage to the neck, there were no other external injuries and no sign of a struggle.’

  Next, the neck was examined. Police reports had suggested Hans Christian had been kneeling, with his hands and feet tied behind his back. But the wounds on his body suggested that he had been lying face up when he was killed, with someone pinning him to the ground. Unless he had been asleep or unconscious, he would have seen everything. The post-mortem findings were grim. The first swing of the blade, a Norwegian army knife, had cut only three centimetres into Ha
ns Christian’s throat, severing his trachea and some of the neck muscles and blood vessels, without ending his life. The doctors found particles of blood in Hans Christian’s lungs that had been inhaled as he struggled for breath. Seconds later, the executioner had tried again, this time cutting across the neck to a depth of four centimetres, the knife stuttering on the spinal cord. The last cut, which caused the third of ‘three deep notches’, according to Dr Reekie, severed the head completely.

  There were a few small mercies. Contrary to some media reports, Hans Christian had not been shot or tortured, and the deep lacerations on his chest spelling out ‘al Faran’ had been made after death. Reekie found them ‘very interesting in that the depth of the cuts was very even and consistent and had almost an artistic quality’. Lastly, the doctors turned their attention to the time of death, concluding that he had died around midnight on 12 August, about the time Marit Hesby had woken from her dream.

  Hans Christian’s body was repatriated to Norway with his family the following day. ‘I couldn’t bear to be in India any longer,’ Marit said. ‘I wasn’t angry with anyone, I just wanted to get him home.’ Just before they left, Ambassador Walther gave her copies of the letters and poems that had been found hidden about her son’s body. The originals remained with security officials in Srinagar. She packed them into her case without looking at them. ‘We decided to read them together as a family, quietly, after we got home.’

  However, by the time they landed in Oslo some of the letters had been leaked to the Indian press. Anette recalled: ‘Even that private moment of sharing his last words was stolen from us.’ For her, the worst thing was the publication of a private message of farewell from her brother. ‘Little big friend and oasis,’ Hans Christian had written, probably sitting alone in the gujjar hut. ‘My smiling sister, my fair half part. What can I tell you? Know that you are beautiful and don’t doubt your own word. Seize the day and if I can tell you anything philosophical remember that everything is to live for. There are positive measures hidden in every shadow. Sister, you are created to bloom and live for the moment. The sorrow is there because you are going to be happier. See all the colours. Separate the colours and breathe stronger than before. I am extremely fond of you. I love you.’

  Nine days later Anette gave the eulogy at her brother’s funeral in Tønsberg Cathedral, a service attended by the Norwegian Prime Minister and the actress and director Liv Ullmann. ‘We’ve waited for you every day and every night since you were taken in Kashmir,’ Anette said of her brother, her voice quivering. ‘Some us have felt the thoughts you were sending us, some of us have felt your strength. You will never be gone. You will live and breathe with us each day, each month and each year. You were my protective big brother, but you were also my best friend. For me you will never be some kind of saint or martyr, you will be my handsome brother … We’ll meet again in another world, in a paradise.’

  Marit had asked that Hans Christian be dressed in the traditional felt hunting outfit she had bought him the previous Christmas, just before he had gone away. Now, as she stood beside his flower-bedecked casket, she willed her son to give a sign that his spirit was still alive. ‘One white rose dipped down, right beside me. I know that it was him, Hans Christian, saying, “I’m fine now, Mummy.”’

  Marit invited all her son’s friends for a pizza-and-beer party at the Tønsberg summerhouse, just as Hans Christian had planned to do upon returning from India. She pasted his last holiday snaps of the Meadow and the road up to Chandanwari into the photo album she had prepared for his homecoming, along with his kathakali pictures. Then she chose the words for his granite headstone in the churchyard close to where she had grown up: ‘When the moon’s veil was lifted, you became the sun’s dancing rays.’ As she carried his ashes down to be buried, she felt a twinge deep inside. ‘It was like the birth pang I had felt when Hans Christian was born. Now I had to give him back.’

  THIRTEEN

  Resolution Through Dialogue

  The discovery of Hans Christian Ostrø’s mutilated corpse stunned the families of the other men still being held in captivity. The manner of his death was unimaginably brutal, dragged like an animal into a forest clearing where he was trussed up and beheaded with his own knife. This was the so-called ‘show kill’ IG Rajinder Tikoo had been worried about. And according to the note pinned to the body, Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk only had forty-eight hours before they met a similar fate, unless the Indian government did something new.

  Almost four thousand miles away in Middlesbrough, Keith Mangan’s mother Mavis felt tormented. ‘Newspapers and TV people phoned all day, asking me, “How do you feel?” I said, “How do you think I feel?” and slammed down the phone.’ Keith’s father Charlie did speak to a reporter, saying, ‘If Keith knows what happened to Hans Ostrø, I shudder to think what he’s thinking about now.’ In Blackburn, Bob Wells, Paul’s father, was desperate and resigned: ‘Apart from raising a private army and sending it in, there is little we can do. Things were moving along quite positively. Now we are back at square one.’ Even John Childs came out to issue a condemnation of the bloody events in India. ‘Although I never met Hans Christian Ostrø, I knew something of what he must have gone through,’ he said later. After he learned how Ostrø had died, all his worst memories came flooding back: the slaughtering of the sheep, the nights shivering under rough blankets wondering if each hour would be his last, the likelihood that he would never see his daughters again. ‘To this day I remain utterly horrified,’ he said.

  Did the other hostages know about Ostrø? No one could be certain. Those in a position to know, the Indian authorities, were giving nothing away and appeared stunned into inertia by the beheading. Something had to be done to reinvigorate the operation to free the hostages, and to get India to articulate its strategy. ‘It’s getting desperate up there now,’ Bob Wells told the Lancashire Telegraph, adding that he wanted the Indians to mount a rescue attempt. Tim Devlin, Charlie and Mavis Mangan’s MP, said the couple agreed: ‘They would rather something was done, even though they know it is enormously risky.’ If India declined, the West should step in, foreign newspaper columnists suggested, calling on their governments to carry out unilateral ‘tactical operations’ in Kashmir to free the men. The pace was upped in New Delhi, the Ambassadors of Norway, Germany and the USA, Arne Walther, Frank Elbe and Frank Wisner, along with the British High Commissioner Sir Nicholas Fenn, demanding ‘crisis talks’ with the Indian Home Minister and intelligence chiefs.

  In London, Commander Roy Ramm recoiled when he heard the news. He thought Ostrø’s killing ‘medieval’. In his long career at New Scotland Yard, where he had risen to become head of Specialist Operations, he had never seen anything quite like it. For the past five years he had been the lead on hostage negotiations, roaming the globe in his attempts to talk captured Britons free, and he had followed the Kashmiri hostage crisis since it first unfolded in the heights of the Pir Panjal.

  Ramm read a hostage situation, one of his chief inspectors said, like a trashy novel – fast and avidly, and not necessarily taking in all the details. He didn’t need to, since he was a master of the judgement call. When he received the first reports of the Kashmir drama, on 5 July, he had been in New York giving a talk at the United Nations. He had ‘stuck out a wet thumb to see which way the wind was blowing’, and concluded at once that things were ‘terrible from the off’, writing in his private journal: ‘I learned that the rebels were demanding the release by the Indian government of what they described as “political prisoners”. I was concerned that we would have little latitude in negotiations.’ He was acutely aware that having faced down the IRA’s bombing campaign for three decades, the British government would never agree to fold before terrorists, let alone condone the release of political detainees, and he presumed that India felt the same.

  An emergency bag always at the ready, passport in one pocket, toothbrush in another, for the past five years Commander Ramm had lived a last-minute life. Permanentl
y on duty, perma-tanned, his hair prematurely greying but elegantly styled, he had a penchant for high-collared, open-necked shirts that disguised his thick neck and narrow shoulders. Roy Ramm was a hunting dog, ever alert for the call that could dispatch him anywhere in the world. Back in London after his New York trip, he was summoned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), fully expecting to be on the next flight to India. This incident needed clarity and speed of response. Instead, a junior civil servant ‘with a broom up his arse and a Double First in Classics’ told him that his services were not needed. ‘That was bloody quick,’ thought the prickly Ramm. That night his anger spilled over into his journal: ‘The FCO seemed to think that the Indians had everything under control.’ He doubted it, since from a quick reading of the facts and a little research into the context – a vicious and unending war between two neighbours sharing a disputed ‘non-border’ – he could see that India needed all the help it could get. ‘That’s why in hostage situations governments brought in outside teams to mediate a solution: a dispassionate voice of reason unconnected to whatever had set the crisis running in the first place.’

  But here he was, Britain’s premier hostage negotiator, getting the brush-off while lives were under threat in Kashmir. ‘White-collar trade unionism’, he called it: ‘Civil servants protecting their arses and their assets.’ Complacency got people killed, he warned. Didn’t they know that? He pointed out that ‘people took hostages primarily to get attention’. If you dismissed the kidnappers, as he believed the Indians were doing for whatever reasons, driving the talks into a ditch intentionally or otherwise, al Faran would feel compelled to kill so as to make itself heard. ‘A skilled negotiator engages the hostage-takers, listens to their concerns and empathises. Once you have their trust, then you can take control,’ Ramm tried to explain, just as IG Tikoo had done thousands of miles away. But the young men with their Double Firsts in Classics had not listened.