by Adrian Levy
However, beneath these meagre offerings – the Urdu-scrawled snapshots of a moment in time – lay a mountain of paperwork, the sum total of what Rajinder Tikoo’s Crime Branch inquiry team had been doing over the seventy-two days that he had been absent from the office, following his first telephone conversation with Jehangir. Here lay a legion of typed affidavits, each one endorsed with a sheet of court-fee-stamp paper, and interrogation reports, sealed as a true record of who had said what to whom by the thumbprints of the broken, illiterate confessors. Interspersed between these official police documents, written in English and Urdu, were page after page of handwritten observations, rough transcripts of unofficial ‘interviews’ and pencil-sketched maps of outlying hamlets, villages, mountain routes, arms caches and suspected militant boltholes. There were typed case notes too, and small, cigarette-card-sized photos of straggle-headed militants (alive and dead), intelligence tips and informers’ reports, some jotted on torn newspaper pages and others on the backs of cigarette packets. In sum, this enormous Crime Branch file, and all of its ancillary evidence folders and boxes, was bursting with the snippets and double-talk that industrious policemen gather during a major operation.
The FIRs were practically all that the families of the hostages and the Western negotiators like Roy Ramm had laid eyes on. But for the Indian and Kashmiri top brass – police, army and intelligence – the entire file was theoretically available, although the choicest bits had been distilled into Daily Situation Reports. The DSR was like a core sample pulled from a giant oak, a summary of everything significant. A shorter version of it would have been included in the Daily Summary, dispatched to anyone with clearance and an interest in the case.
Here, seen only by a select circle of high-ranking Indian readers, was every last detail of a thorough investigation that no one in the West even knew existed. The unedited bundles and boxes were packed with revelations, just one of which would have rejuvenated the anaemic FBI and Scotland Yard investigations.
The Kashmiri police donkeywork had begun on 5 July, just hours after the first kidnappings, when IG Tikoo, then still based in his pipe-smoke-scented Crime Branch office with its wooden veranda, had called in one of his superintendents, SP (Crime) Mohammad Amin Shah, a garrulous veteran investigator. Regardless of what other security agencies were planning to do to tackle the unfurling crisis, Tikoo had ordered Shah to form a dedicated Crime Branch team. ‘We couldn’t leave the police response down to the deputy superintendents out in the field,’ Tikoo recalled, referring to men like DSP Kifayat Haider, stationed in Bijbehara, for whom he had little respect. ‘This was a complex and difficult matter whose consequences were potentially enormous, threatening to blight the whole of Kashmir as a valley of kidnappers and killers, and it demanded investigation and coordination, directed from the centre.’
Savvy and well turned-out, SP Shah knew what kind of detective to put on this case. He called in another superintendent, Mushtaq Mohammad Sadiq, who ranked below him, but was among the most experienced field officers in the department. A master of the unconventional, who was happiest working off-diary on covert investigations, Sadiq was small, moustachioed, grey-faced, and appeared to be all forearms. He was also young, clever and invisible. While many in the Jammu and Kashmir Police spent as much time courting the press as pursuing their cases, getting themselves written up heroically and riding around town in bullet-pocked Gypsies or gleaming Ambassadors, SP Sadiq always remained in the shadows, valuing his anonymity, which was key for a man who was about to rub up against the Movement.
Sadiq had got to understand the value of preserving his anonymity when he served in the counter-insurgency unit, listening in to the militants’ chatter, hearing the gunmen identifying individual cops and intelligence agents as targets, drawing up detailed kill lists, locating their stations and homes before laying ambushes. Although SP Sadiq was well known on the insurgents’ grapevine, given the number of operations he had run and his tally of kills, and his reputation for savage interrogation and ruthlessness while undercover, they had a name only. Pinning a likeness on him proved impossible. ‘Sadiq: he’s that thickset one like a pony-wallah.’ ‘No, that’s Ghulam Nabi from intel,’ ran one exchange he overheard. Or, ‘That Sadiq has long, long wild hair like a pir.’ ‘No, it’s razored, like Haider’s.’ And finally he had eavesdropped this: ‘Can anyone describe this Sadiq? We’re beginning to believe the bastard doesn’t exist.’
A Kashmiri Muslim from downtown Srinagar, Sadiq understood the street. He had thrived in the most challenging postings, such as Anantnag, the volatile south Kashmir town that militants had poured into over recent years. There he had melted into the crowds of fired-up Kashmiri youth and Pakistani-backed militias, finding and managing high-value sources so as to feed a steady stream of valuable intelligence back to police lines. But he was under no illusions as to where his real loyalties lay. As well as the ISI-trained Kashmiri and Pakistani gunmen who took potshots at him, he also hated the Indian chauvinists in the security forces and elsewhere, Hindu hawks who flew in to hoist the saffron, white and green union flag, rah-rah-rahing about ‘Kashmir being Indian’ before retreating to their heavily fortified camps to watch the valley burn.
Sadiq saw himself as a Kashmir-born Indian – in that order. The alternative, to be a son of Kashmir who rejected India and who chose to fight, was a fool’s choice, he believed. To his mind, the fight for azadi had become corrupted over the past six years. ‘Azadi’ was a fine-sounding catchcry for Kashmiri politicians, but most of them used it to enrich themselves, accepting money from Pakistan while ignoring the plight of their impoverished constituents, opening themselves up to accusations from New Delhi that they were treasonous and corrupt. The young men who actually enlisted with militant outfits were similarly foolish, in Sadiq’s opinion, doomed to be little more than cannon fodder, dying in their thousands, their sacrifice going unremarked, while the real aspiration of the Kashmiri people – to be left alone to govern themselves – was crushed between the jostling tectonic plates of New Delhi and Islamabad.
When he got the first call about the hostages on 5 July, Sadiq made few demands: ten men of his choosing, freed from all other duties, who would exchange their uniforms for skullcaps and woollen Kashmiri pherans, and would not set foot in a police station unless their lives depended on it. They would be referred to in the file simply as ‘the Squad’.
The Crime Branch file showed that the Squad hit Pahalgam hard on 6 and 7 July, brushing aside DSP Haider. Without stopping to introduce themselves or to explain why they were there, Sadiq’s plain-clothed officers had scoured the trekking town for information, targeting local hoteliers and drivers, guides and pony-wallahs, many of whom regarded the militants as heroes, but whose livelihoods were now in jeopardy. If the kidnapping crisis could not be defused, the Squad warned them, the Indian security forces would relentlessly turn them over, splintering their businesses and smashing their homes. And if they did not assist the investigation, this formerly charmed gateway to the mountains might appear to have broken its bond with its foreign guests, and be shunned by them for years to come. They need look no further than Aru, which in the year since the 1994 abductions of Kim Housego and David Mackie had been transformed into a ghost town.
The guilt and fear soon got many in Pahalgam talking. One of the first taboos to be broken was the fingering of Sikander, with numerous residents identifying the man who up until this point had been seen by many as a local hero, as the éminence grise behind al Faran. The word on Pahalgam’s blustery single street was that Sikander, who informers claimed had been in and out of the town in recent months, had been working with his Pakistani controllers to coordinate a kidnapping operation that had its roots as far back as January. Someone said that while Sikander was supervising the operation, the man in charge on the ground was a foreign militant called the Turk, who had been operating in Kashmir on and off for a couple of years, and who ‘dressed like a holy man but had a reputation for brutality’. Resid
ents also identified the Turk’s deputy as Qari Zarar, a Kashmiri-born militant from the southern side of the Pir Panjal mountains, a man who saw himself as a leader, but whom the Squad marked down as ‘second fiddle’.
Under interrogation, former militants and sympathisers named the two most important Pakistanis in the kidnap party as Nabeel Ghazni and Abu Khalifa. Both were said to have trained in Camp Yawar, and to have had lengthy battlefield experience in Afghanistan. Backing up Ghazni and Khalifa were two Kashmiris from Doda district: Sikander Mohammed and Mohammed Haroon. These four veterans made up the tier of command beneath the Turk and Qari Zarar, and were all thought to have been accompanying the hostages from Day One. Sadiq’s team sent a report to the higher-ups along these lines: ‘It should be noted, that we have identified the core members of the kidnap party etc. etc. …’
The rest of the gunmen were known only by their fighting names: Shoaib, Waheed, Asif, Yusuf, Jawad, Batoor, Ghazan and Droon, the last three being Pashtun names, suggesting that they originated from the Pakistan–Afghan border. The others, as far as the Squad could ascertain, were mostly Pakistanis from Kotli or Mirpur, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Lastly, there were a number of gujjars and dards, impoverished shepherds and hunters whose hennaed hair and kohl-rimmed eyes marked them as outsiders, and who came and went. Their job was guarding the heights above the hostage party, and acting as lookouts and sentries outside the gujjar huts where the hostages spent their nights. A photo of some members of the kidnap team was even procured by the Squad, that a fighter had presumably taken using a camera he had stolen from the hostages, and gone to the lengths of getting developed. It showed five men in battle gear, smiling broadly on a grassy hillside at the height of summer, arms around each other’s shoulders, Kalashnikovs at ease, daggers hanging from belts. ‘On tour with al Faran,’ one of Sadiq’s officers quipped. A copy was placed in the file, where it remains today. When it was shown to John Childs many years later, he instantly recognised the tall, smiling militant on the left of the picture. ‘That’s the one I arm-wrestled,’ he said. ‘One of the more reasonable of our captors.’
Within three days, the Squad had drawn the higher-ups’ attention to its first significant conclusion: ‘Al Faran is meaningless.’ The Squad believed the kidnappings had been carried out by the Movement, an ISI-sponsored Pakistani militant group mentored by Maulana Khalil from Karachi. A report was sent along the lines: ‘It should be noted, that we have linked … etc.’ The team also had proof positive of an overlap between those responsible for the 1994 abductions of Kim Housego and David Mackie and these kidnappings, as many in the present kidnap party were known to have worked both operations.
The next task was far harder. The Squad would need to infiltrate the Movement and track down Sikander, who was thought not to be travelling with the kidnap party but holed up in a Movement safe house. Their ultimate goal was to get someone into or alongside the al Faran team, an ambitious task, but one they thought possible. They started with the Movement’s allies in and around Pahalgam, trying to see who might be flipped. They also activated their own sources out in the deep countryside, and all the way down to Anantnag town: assets, paid and unpaid, volunteers and those who had been press-ganged, rural people over whom the police already had the clamp, and who could be made to befriend and then betray the men around Sikander – in the knowledge that their lives (and those of their families) depended on it.
It began in Dabran village, with Sadiq’s men targeting Sikander’s childhood home, close to the village’s communal wash-house and general store. Throwing the Bhat family’s possessions into the mud, the security officials threatened to return every week and do it again, until they talked. This prompted Sikander’s desperate father, Ghulam Ahmed Bhat, to bury what keepsakes they had to remind them of their son in the garden – a school bus pass, ID card and birth certificate. ‘I also took the only photo we had, placed it in a bag and pushed it deep beneath a bed of vegetables,’ he recalled.
In the first days after the kidnappings the Squad struck continually in Pahalgam, tearing apart Sikander’s associations: door-to-door midnight arrests, the lightning application of brutish force. This flushed out the revelation that the kidnap team had not headed higher into the mountains after snatching the first four backpackers on 4 July, but had brazenly descended into Pahalgam at 2 a.m. on 5 July – right into the hive of police and paramilitaries. Could this possibly be true, Sadiq wondered. Sikander was bold, but would he choose such a high-risk strategy while his team was holding foreign hostages? It seemed unlikely, but when several eyewitnesses came forward to describe how a small procession of militants had snaked its way down the mountain and into the slumbering trekking station in the early hours of 5 July, over a small wooden bridge and into the Heevan Hotel, the story began to have a ring of truth about it. Some of those working at the Heevan were already under suspicion of secretly supporting and working for Sikander’s outfit.
The Squad raided the Heevan Hotel early on 6 July. Their search led them to a tatty, unpainted attic room with boarded-up windows, a small, airless chamber where it was impossible to stand up straight because of the protruding eaves. It was empty, but there was plenty of evidence that it had recently been occupied: ‘The tea in the cups was warm, and breakfast plates and bedrolls were still scattered around,’ said an officer who witnessed the scene. In the bathroom, a dank and dirty corner, a tap was still running, and on the floor were foreign food wrappers and scraps of paper. The detectives questioned the hotel staff, eventually finding an old Kashmiri chowkidar, or night-watchman, who confirmed that an armed party had turned up at the hotel in the early hours of 5 July. He had shown them to the attic room, and been ordered to look after them.
Were the foreigners among them, the interrogators asked, pressing him hard. The chowkidar seemed evasive, saying that it had been dark. All he did know was that he had heard through kitchen staff that the Movement had abducted a group of foreigners from a campsite in the Lidderwat Valley sometime the previous evening. ‘It was already the talk of the town,’ he whispered. ‘Everyone knew.’ Later, he had listened at the door, and overheard men speaking about hostages and ransom demands. They seemed to be communicating with others via a two-way radio. ‘He was sure those inside the room were leading the kidnapping,’ said a member of the Squad’s interrogation team.
By now the chowkidar was terrified, and he clammed up. In an attempt to clarify the story, the Squad found a young Kashmiri waiter who also worked at the Heevan, and who admitted (under brusque questioning) that he had taken food up to the room several times over the following forty-eight hours. Slowly, the frightened boy drew a vivid picture of a group of men sitting quietly in a darkened room, whispering occasionally, with heads bowed. He had only snatched a few glimpses, as at all times the door had been guarded from the inside by two foreign mujahideen, while two more kept watch outside, and others were positioned at the base of the stairwell and around the rear of the hotel, close to the kitchens and refuse bins. To the Squad it was clear: they had uncovered al Faran’s base camp, brazenly established in the town itself.
The boy described how the party in the room had repeatedly called for food and drink, and he had brought up trays of tea, chapattis and daal fry. A string of thickset Kashmiri militants had arrived throughout the night, smelling of gunmetal and goose fat. From the reaction of the guards, the boy said, some of them must have been senior commanders.
The next time the door was unlocked he had caught sight of a clean-shaven man, dressed like a schoolteacher in a shirt and jacket, with an instantly recognisable face: Sikander. ‘What did he say?’ the police interrogators demanded. ‘What was the plan for the hostages?’ The boy could not recall much, as he had only overheard snatches of conversation. At one point Sikander had said, speaking quickly: ‘Kya tumne dopehar ka khana khaya?’ (Did the hostages have their lunch?) ‘No,’ a distant voice had replied. ‘They are hungry and getting agitated. They keep asking questions about when they will
be freed. What should we say?’ The boy said he thought he had heard the crackle of a two-way radio.
‘Maze karein,’ Sikander had said, instructing the captors to eat well. The men in the room had then slept for an hour, the boy stated, until their first namaz prayer of the day, around 5 a.m. Over the next three hours the room’s occupants had spoken on the radio several more times, and slept again, until more food arrived after 9 a.m., oily fried eggs and flat bread that everyone wolfed down, after which they were ordered in Urdu, ‘Khamosh raho.’ Silence. Several gunmen raised their Kalashnikovs to their lips as a rumpus started below in the hotel proper. Guests were awakening, and their breakfast babble rose through the floor with the smell of buttered toast, bringing fresh tension into the attic room.
Some tourists had their breakfast on plastic chairs and tables arranged on the lawn overlooking the Lidder River. The Heevan Hotel was the plushest spot in town, its literature boasting ‘exclusively furnished rooms and suites with wall-to-wall carpeting’. A grand reception area panelled with pine led to a travel centre, banqueting hall and what was described as a ‘multi-cuisine’ restaurant, which meant that a few Kashmiri specialities – meats prepared in yoghurt and almond-flecked green tea – were served alongside Indian staples from the Punjabi north and the Tamil south. From the corridor beneath the attic room came a girl’s muffled laugh and a man’s response. Trekkers were setting out for the high passes, excited and fired-up. If only they had known what was going on just above their heads. Snatches of conversation floated up from the garden. Someone was talking about a walk up to Aru and Kolahoi. A man was discussing the Amarnath routes with his wife.