The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  Later, noises had come from the street outside. The chowkidar, who appeared from the file transcript to have undergone many hours of intense interrogation despite his advanced age, admitted he had gone to see what was happening. A group of Kashmiri students who had been camping in the Meadow had arrived in the town and raised the alarm about the kidnapping. The waiter recalled the same incident, and said that soon after, the party in the attic room had moved into a corner, far from the window.

  The chowkidar recalled another loud commotion outside, which included foreign voices, at around 2 p.m. Again he had slipped out. ‘Several women had arrived from Lidderwat,’ he said, ‘telling everyone there had been a kidnapping up in the mountains.’ The Squad had underlined these words in the interrogation report, clearly struck by the image of three Western women out in the street calling for help, unaware that the men who controlled the fates of their loved ones were just yards away, listening to everything that was going on.

  By sunset on 5 July the noise outside had died down as Pahalgam settled in for the night, recalled the boy. The party in the attic room stayed put too, while outside a local police inquiry was unfolding, with DSP Kifayat Haider arriving from Srinagar. But by the early hours of 6 July, the al Faran party was fractious and jumpy, arguing among themselves. The next thing the chowkidar remembered was around 4 a.m., when he heard the men in the attic room being ordered to dress: ‘Get up, take your things, we have to move.’ Shivering as they emerged at the bottom of the stairwell, they had made straight for a narrow alley. ‘Quick, quick, out of sight!’ a gunman had shouted, pushing them into the darkness, away from the Heevan Hotel, out of Pahalgam and up into the silent Betaab Valley in the general direction of Amarnath, where, as John Childs would later confirm, the hostages and kidnappers were holed up.

  There, the interrogation notes ended. A second report in the Crime Branch file consisted of a medical statement that sometime on 7 July the Heevan’s chowkidar had collapsed during interrogation. His questioners’ names had been redacted from the official report, their alarm hinted at by the correspondence and the forms they filled in about the incident. A doctor was called for. He took one look at the old man, pronounced him dead and turned on his heels. As news got out about the chowkidar’s death during interrogation, Pahalgam bridled, with youths pelting a police post with stones, haranguing DSP Haider, accusing his officers of torturing an old man to death.

  ‘A cop among the people’, as he liked to think of himself, DSP Haider depended on the good will of the local populace. But on the morning of 7 July, when he had arrived at work to find Pahalgam police station besieged by furious locals, he had had no idea what was going on. He rang SP Mushtaq Sadiq and his superiors for an explanation. An internal investigation was promised, and the Squad called in another doctor to examine the chowkidar. He concluded that the old man had had ‘a weak heart that could explain his passing’. With insufficient evidence, and one opinion in their favour, Sadiq’s Squad was in the clear. They moved on, focusing on Amarnath in their search for the hostages. As Qari Zarar and two others among the kidnappers were from Doda, a district far to the south-east of Pahalgam, the Crime Branch team had a good idea of where they might be headed. Beyond Amarnath lay the wild passes and remote valleys of the Pir Panjal, and little-used nomad routes that led towards an untamed land without electricity or telephones, a place of perma-winter.

  The Warwan, an intimidating, windswept basin whose name means ‘green valley’, lies hidden in one of the wildest and most sparsely populated corners of the subcontinent, thirty miles’ hard trekking to the south-east of Pahalgam, a journey that involves a gruelling ice climb over the Sonasar Pass at fourteen thousand feet. Only a few dirt-poor, isolated gujjar and dard communities cling to the Warwan’s sheer, scarified rock flanks, their simple stone huts, or bivouacs constructed from tarpaulins, looking down onto the turbulent glacial water of the Mariev Sudher River below. Down in the alluvial plain that turns a vivid green with mountain grasses in summer, a series of ancient wood-and-stone villages dot the river’s banks, some reached by rotting suspension bridges or large stepping stones across the water. To the north, enclosed by inaccessible snow-clad ridges on all sides, lie the high peaks of Kargil and India’s northernmost tip, where frostbitten nomadic Kashmiri tribesmen mingle with Tibetan herders along the long, harsh border with China. To the north-west lies the equally isolated Pakistani region of Gilgit, and to the east the tiny, remote Buddhist kingdoms of Zanskar and Ladakh, with their wind-whipped prayer flags, where the arid cold and heat have reduced the landscape to sand. Warwan has a fierce, primeval air. It is a place where time has stood still for centuries, and where the residents are happy to spend most of their lives cut off from the outside world.

  There are no roads, cars, police posts or rules. Warwan’s remoteness has made it off-limits to foreign trekkers and unarmed government officials, but in 1995 it was open to hordes of itinerant gunmen. Open a baker’s wooden cash drawer in Inshan, the largest village in the valley, and you were just as likely to pull out Saudi riyals or Uzbeki soms as Indian or Pakistani rupees. There were likely to be coins from the Caucasus and Iranian rials, not to mention pesos from the Philippines, indicating how the Warwan had become a stronghold for Islamic fighters of many different nationalities who were pouring into Kashmir from the Arab world, the former Soviet states and elsewhere in Asia, causing the native villagers and herders to live in fear. Twenty miles long and inaccessible for eight months of the year, Warwan was easily defendable by whoever got there first during the thaw.

  The only way out of Warwan to the south is via a zigzag track that rises above Inshan, a settlement of hungry farmers, heroin smugglers and arms dealers. When the rain arrives it becomes a treacherous cascade of churned mud. When frozen it is an impassable chute. Even during the dry season, the severity of its inclines spooks the thickset ponies that hack up towards an army outpost at the inhospitable Mardan Top. At thirteen thousand feet, Mardan Top is an angry bowl, barren and brown, nestling in the crook of far higher peaks, leading across and eventually down into the outer limits of Anantnag district. There is nothing awe-inspiring about Mardan Top, and the Indian soldiers unlucky enough to be posted there rarely emerge from their huts, although some have painted on boulders the other name given to this high pass: the valley of death. Gusts of dry, freezing air desiccate whatever they touch, cracking skin, blistering lips, followed by wisps of wet fog that saturate everything and then freeze over, the combined wet-and-dry tools of erosion that reduce rocky outcrops to rubble, and are capable of driving even mountain men mad.

  By the second week of July 1995, with John Childs having escaped and two new hostages to consider, Warwan was where the Crime Branch Squad began to focus their search. They had been led there by intelligence picked up in Pahalgam, and also by interviews conducted with Kim Housego after his and David Mackie’s release from captivity in the summer of 1994. He had said that after climbing for several days east of Pahalgam, their guards had placed lookouts on the upper reaches of a vast and remote valley: ‘We had walked for sixteen hours over high and dangerous passes. At times I thought I would slip down the side of the mountains still thick with ice and snow. We were fearful of being carried away by avalanches. I was badly sunburnt, as I had no protection.’ They passed nobody all day, and Kim watched, sickened, as the militants photographed each other with the cameras they had stolen from them. After spending the night in an empty gujjar hut, ‘where we were soaked to the skin and sat around a smoking fire unable to sleep’, the next morning they had reached the pinch-point of Sukhnoi, the northernmost village in the shadow of the Sonasar Pass. A cluster of stone houses roofed with wood shingles, Sukhnoi is ringed by huge boulders that have rolled down the mountainsides, and looks out over the rich floodplain of the raging Mariev Sudher River. Sukhnoi feels forsaken even in summer. The only manmade materials in view are the zinc sheets painted Islamic green on the roof of the village masjid that someone has manhandled over the mountain
s.

  At the edge of Sukhnoi is a wooden guesthouse, built for travellers forced to overnight when bad weather or exhaustion prevented them from completing the up-and-over to Pahalgam. ‘It looked like a Swiss chalet, unlike the rest of the houses in the village, that rested on stilts,’ Kim recalled. ‘Inside were two rooms, each of which had their own fireplace. With the rest of the group, now about seventeen, we shared the two rooms.’ They had remained there from 10 to 13 June, according to police files. Kim reflected: ‘The weather had turned bad. Mist and rain engulfed the valley. At times we could no longer see the mountains.’ Rashid, an English-speaking militant commander, told them that some of the group had been sent out with a hand-held radio to try to establish contact with their leaders in Srinagar, but had failed. ‘We felt completely cut off,’ Kim recalled.

  Inside the hut, an increasingly irritable David Mackie had taunted his devout guards with his atheism, while Kim had told them about the new life he was planning at his English boarding school at the end of the summer. Meals were invariably rice and bread, but ‘occasionally, on a good day, some lentils or tough inedible meat were added’. The names of some of his captors had stayed with him: Rashid, Wahid and Suebe, with whom he had been photographed – possibly the same man referred to by Hans Christian Ostrø as ‘Schub’. Kim said they had passed the hours ‘drinking endless cups of tea brought to us by the villagers on the orders of the group’, and that ‘the villagers we met looked scared. We had no conversation with them.’ Eventually they had been led out of Sukhnoi and down the Warwan, following ‘a broad track with walls either side’. Kim had ‘vivid memories of the militants descending the valley, their Kalashnikovs held out in front of them as on a raid in a film’.

  After walking almost the length of the undulating Warwan towards Inshan, they had frustratingly been ordered to retrace their steps, as Indian forces had been deployed in the area. They ended up back in Sukhnoi in the middle of the night. ‘I began to think I might never have a holiday again – and might not even survive,’ said Kim. After another depressing night in the chalet they began the arduous journey back to Pahalgam. At Chandanwari they were met by three militants the hostages had not seen before. ‘They looked different, more educated, and clearly from the town. They all welcomed us with a big hug, and one said, “Inshallah, tomorrow you will be free and with your families.”’ It was very likely that one of them was Sikander, the Squad concluded. Kim and David were then taken to a hotel and allowed to shower in warm water, but afterwards one militant was offended to see that David had shaved. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Your prophet had a beard.’ Later, the group had commandeered a taxi and taken the two hostages down to Anantnag, their faces wrapped in scarves to disguise their recognisably Western features. The following day Kim and David had been released into the hands of Yusuf Jameel’s photographer friend Mushtaq Ali of AFP.

  Sadiq knew that the mujahideen were creatures of habit, and the Squad were working on the theory that the Movement would use Sukhnoi again. The village stares down the barrel of the Warwan, and is protected by cliffs on three sides. It is so isolated that it has retained its own dialect, a pure form of medieval Kashmiri that is not understood by city sophisticates whose language has over time become mingled with Urdu and Hindi.

  Maybe the hostages were already in the village. But Sukhnoi’s isolation made it hard to observe even from a distance. Armed al Faran scouts or their hired hands would be all around, dominating the high ground, as Kim Housego had described. But the location of the village could also be an advantage, the Squad reasoned. Most of the necessities of life had to be brought in, meaning there was constant traffic, with villagers and their ponies coming and going, bartering with their government ration books down in Inshan and even as far away as Pahalgam. There the Squad intended to tap them up, offering small sums of money, courting them slowly, warming them around a fire, buying them tea and bread, drawing out information from poor and hungry men.

  By the third week in July, Sadiq’s men had pieced together various snippets of information to build up a picture of the kidnappers’ movements. After a miserable week spent in the high passes around Sheshnag, losing one hostage (Childs) then snatching two more (Hasert and Ostrø), al Faran had pitched into Sukhnoi on 9 or 10 July. One of the first villagers coaxed to speak to the Squad said that ‘a party of eighteen or so fighters with five Westerners stormed in late at night’. The Squad sent a report to the higher-ups: ‘It should be noted that we have the likely location, etc., etc. …’

  Gradually, as more villagers were squeezed, cajoled and bribed, a fuller picture emerged. The prisoners, the Squad were told, were locked in the wooden guesthouse on the outskirts of the village. This was confirmed when the photos of them sitting against a wooden backdrop reached Srinagar. These matched those taken in 1994 of Mackie and Housego, who recalled how their kidnappers had repeatedly tried to photograph them inside the guesthouse: ‘David was asked to take pictures, which he did and then exposed them so that they would not be used as propaganda.’ A report went out to the relevant Indian authorities, something like this: ‘It should be noted that the location in Sukhnoi is confirmed, as is the house itself etc., etc.’

  The Squad now knew who al Faran was, its structure, and where it was hiding the hostages. They even had a makeshift map of Sukhnoi, drawn by a local, on which the location of the hostages’ hut was marked. Over the following days, their information was refined with the help of more first-hand accounts. Some travelling members of the village headman’s extended family were pressured into talking. They recalled telling the police, ‘The gunmen arrived running. They pointed their weapons at our relatives, demanding hospitality. “We are alone here and unarmed,” we told them. “What are we supposed to do?”’ There was not enough food for the families living in Sukhnoi, let alone to feed the newcomers as well. ‘“You bringing foreigners here will endanger all of our lives,” we told them.’ But al Faran had been insistent. ‘You will do your best. You will not speak of this or talk to the foreigners.’ ‘What should we have done? We were outnumbered and outgunned. They would have killed us all.’ The headman’s family was forced to turn their main kitchen into a canteen, with his wives deputed to cook for the hostage party and bring them endless cups of tea. ‘We were terrified.’

  Three teams of seven sentries rotated the guard duty, creating three security rings: one in Sukhnoi itself, a second out in the valley among the gujjar animal flocks, and a third high above the village, using rocky outcrops as guard posts. The outfit was well equipped, with new Japanese VHF radio sets, Morse-code pads and Diamond antennae, used to deflect their signals off the mountains, confusing any attempts by the Indian military to locate them with direction-finding equipment. The signal from a basic radio would have been blocked by the mountains, but with a Diamond antenna placed on a peak, its range could be boosted by twenty miles or more. A detailed Squad report on al Faran’s communications noted how sophisticated it was, making the police certain that this was ‘a state-backed operation’ funded by Pakistan using advanced communication equipment and practised methods: ‘Instead of a single frequency, they jump with their message, relaying them over a number of pre-set frequencies. At other times the data is broadcast in “packets” or bursts. They are highly trained, and have tapped into a sophisticated militant comms network that relays their messages over the LoC. This MC [master channel] that catches their signal is run by operators living in the high Pir Panjal, who have access to sophisticated HF radio sets that can broadcast three hundred miles, easily reaching Pakistan or Kabul.’ The only thing that could stop them talking was the weather, as Kim Housego had witnessed in 1994.

  The Squad’s picture of life in the Warwan became fuller with each new statement extracted from a villager. The Sukhnoi maulvi told them how the hostages lived: ‘Each morning the foreigners were allowed out to exercise on the grass banks beside the river. Sometimes they played volleyball or football for several hours.’ It was an unlikely image, the captiv
es herded onto an improvised sports pitch, but the Squad thought it must have helped to keep them manageable. A woodcutter who frequently travelled in and out of the Warwan said: ‘By dusk they are back inside, where they are provided with lavash and daal. We are discouraged from talking to them. The guards changed frequently. Even if we wanted to reach out to them we would have been prevented. It was strange to have these outsiders living among us and not be able to get to know them.’ Another statement came from a family of herders who had passed through Sukhnoi: ‘The foreigners called out to us. We felt ashamed. It is not our way to watch people suffering.’ A report was sent up the line of command by the Squad, and out via the DSR to all interested parties: ‘Location, village, conditions confirmed, etc., etc.’

  By the first week in August, the Squad had drawn up basic profiles of the captives from the testimony of villagers.

  ‘The younger British hostage [Paul]: Moody, sits on his own on the floor, to the right of the door. Depressed and scared. Arguing with the guards and his fellow hostages. Won’t eat with his hands. Has made a spoon with a stick.’

  ‘The German [Dirk]: Talks with the Norwegian, but otherwise is silent. Sickened by the food. Spends time inside the hut when others are out. Unable to cope? Sleeps with his hands over his head.’

  ‘The American [Don]: Villagers nickname him sarpanch [headman]. Has got the guards to back off by persuading there will be no escape bid. Had a charpoy [Indian bed] brought over for the captives to use during the day that is placed outside the door. The guards have started coming to him with problems. Treats minor wounds and has helped sick villagers.’

  ‘The Norwegian [Hans Christian]: Villagers call him the magician. Has tried to learn the dialect, making everyone laugh. Constantly irritates his guards by dancing and singing loudly, some kind of south Indian dance. Made a ball. Whittled a bat. Used string and poles to make a net. Tried to catch fish in the river. Asked if they could play baseball and volleyball. Taught children games.’