by Adrian Levy
When she was back on British soil Julie held a press conference, wanting to head off the newspaper and TV reporters. Charlie and Mavis stood by nervously as she explained why, in need of a different kind of support, she had left New Delhi. ‘My source of that support is here at home with the community, my friends and my family,’ she said. Mavis, buoyed by Julie’s return, also said a few words. It felt good to be face to face at last.
Then Julie fell to pieces. She couldn’t work, wouldn’t eat, and was consumed by guilt at having abandoned her husband to his fate. She moved in with her mother in Eston, but was kept awake by horrific dreams: Keith falling through the ice, or locked up somewhere beneath the forest floor, or shackled and injured in the snow, or suffering and frightened in some isolated herders’ hut. Kashmir seemed so far away. The local Kashmiri community on Teesside got in touch, offering to help, and a couple of times they got together. But Julie left those meetings feeling as hollow as she had in Srinagar. As far as she could see, they just wanted to use her predicament to highlight their woes: ‘The sheer negativity of those people shocked me.’
Jane’s return was also low-key but fraught. She spent a week ‘crying on the settee’ with her parents in Orefield, Pennsylvania, before facing Spokane. Everyone rallied around, arranging a potluck dinner, filling her in about everything the city was still doing to keep Don’s memory alive. But the home he and she had packed with mementos now filled her with a crushing feeling of loss, whether she was sitting in his study, or gazing out over the back garden, or looking up at the moon and ‘wondering if he could see it too’. There was one gift he had not yet seen: a crystal ball she had bought for his forty-third birthday. If only she’d given it to him before they went to Kashmir, he would have joked. Not wanting to fester, Jane returned to work, and got on with her life straight away – shopping, gardening, running, teaching, cycling, sleeping.
Then, after forty-nine days of silence, al Faran re-emerged on the other side of the world.
On 9 November a handwritten message was dropped at the coop of smoke-filled offices that made up the Press Enclave in Srinagar. Still without access to the official inquiry, and with nothing to do in Kashmir, many of the Scotland Yard and FBI investigators had returned to New Delhi. But now that there was something to analyse, the Church Lane guesthouse quickly filled up again, even though the contents of this long-awaited al Faran communication were troubling.
One of the hostages had suffered ‘bad injuries’ after a fall, it claimed, while another was ‘ill and being given medical aid’. No names or details of the accident were revealed, in a calculating disclosure that could not be verified. While Roy Ramm and co. remained sceptical, a new eyewitness claimed to have seen Don being carried around ‘on a militant’s back’. Given how many weeks the hostages had been in captivity, and the harshness of the terrain and the climate, this report could not be ruled out either. The investigators were struck by another thought. The last time this kind of card had been played by al Faran – the theatrical images purporting to show the wounded Don and Keith after a firefight – it had presaged a breakthrough in the secret negotiations. While everyone was certain the photographs had been rigged, they accompanied al Faran’s first major concession, a dropping of the prisoner numbers from twenty-one to fifteen. Would this new letter, after so many weeks of silence, also be accompanied by a move, perhaps towards a deal? Hopefully, Ramm and the other negotiators told each other, the Indians were working on something special.
They got nothing from General Saklani. Instead, an uncompromising Director General of Police, Mahendra Sabharwal, Rajinder Tikoo’s boss, his hair lacquered and neatly cut in a short back and sides, emerged to face the press. He had nothing to say about the government’s progress. He could not even confirm if any negotiations were taking place. Instead, he warned al Faran that the hostages’ welfare was solely their responsibility. The whole world was watching, he said, and they should release the prisoners unconditionally if they were concerned about their health. ‘The DG was on the money,’ Ramm thought, but being so utterly uncompromising was not necessarily a good tactic in hostage negotiations. He wished he knew what was going on behind the scenes.
Back in the USA and Europe, the women began questioning their decision to leave India. Responding to al Faran’s message, Jane in Spokane issued a measured statement that concealed her mounting anxiety: ‘I will return to India when events indicate my presence can contribute in any way to Don’s safety or to his release.’ She would not be indulging in any mudslinging: ‘The governments of India, Germany, Great Britain, Norway and the United States have worked tirelessly to win the release of the captives. I am most grateful for their efforts.’
Five days later, al Faran surfaced again, this time to claim that the hostages’ condition was worsening: ‘One of them is struggling for life. If one of them dies, the government will be solely responsible.’ Don and Jane had always stuck to their plans, and the current plan Jane had formulated was to stay put in the US. But if Don was on his deathbed, how could she sit by and do nothing? The cruelty was unending, she thought, angry at what al Faran was putting them all through and disgruntled with the Indian authorities for not doing more to end this standoff.
Then, on 16 November, Srinagar’s Press Enclave emptied as the journalists headed to Anantnag following a tip-off from a reliable conduit that Don was about to be released. But the BBC’s Yusuf Jameel wasn’t there to join the procession. Two months back, on 7 September, a woman wearing a burqa had come to his office. Every day, many mothers and daughters came to beseech him to investigate the fate of their missing relatives, and she had joined the line of petitioners, eventually leaving a packet on his desk, since he was busy on the phone. Yusuf’s friend, the photographer Mushtaq Ali, had ripped it open, detonating a bomb that blew him to pieces, strafing Yusuf with shrapnel and injuring another photographer.
The BBC had flown the distraught Yusuf to London for emergency medical treatment. Haunted by the loss of his friend and by the knowledge that he had been the intended target, he had been told to stay put in London while his contacts in the establishment and at the Press Enclave investigated a conspiracy to kill him that appeared to involve senior members of the Indian Army and their dupes – although the military weakly denied it. Everyone knew that Yusuf’s report of eyewitnesses’ claims that Indian soldiers had torched the ancient city of Charar-i-Sharief in May had so enraged the military that they accused him of treasonous incitement. Even now, as Harley Street doctors attended to him, anonymous threats continued to be levelled at Yusuf, passed to the BBC bureau in New Delhi and through his colleagues in Kashmir.
The parcel-bomb attack had stunned the Srinagar Press Enclave. If the army could do this, committing an overt act of terrorism against a BBC employee, indifferent to the ramifications, what else was it capable of? Ever since, Kashmir’s journalists had been treading extra carefully, especially when it came to the hostages. They too were sceptical about the authorities’ apparent lack of urgency in resolving the ongoing crisis, but knew better than to probe too deeply into what lay behind it.
The tip about Don Hutchings’ release was the only uplifting news they had had in many months. Mushtaq Ali’s death had taken its toll on everyone. The Press Enclave wanted the story to be true. To Yusuf it seemed entirely plausible that, unable to cope with the freezing weather, having failed to strike a deal with intractable New Delhi, and possibly with the Westerners’ health worsening, al Faran was looking for any way out. Four months was a long time to hold hostages. The Muslim Janbaz League had held the previous record for the longest kidnapping in Kashmir, having imprisoned two Swedish engineers in western Kashmir for ninety-seven days in the spring of 1992. Shaking his head and wincing, their field commander, Qadir Dar, recalled: ‘It was really one of the most stressful operations we ever mounted. They ate more than we could afford. They wanted to drink things we could never find in a Muslim country. And they played on everyone’s mind all the time to such a degree
that our mujahids felt destroyed. We could also never really communicate with each other, as poor English, theirs and ours, got in the way.’ The al Faran team was 134 days in, and facing a long winter ahead, during which nothing could move. Yusuf could almost imagine the conversations he would have been having with Sikander if he had remained in Kashmir.
Despite the journalists’ hopes, there was no sign of Don in Anantnag. The next day, 17 November, another message was dropped off at the Press Enclave. Its tone struck everyone who read it. ‘The sick hostage’s condition is deteriorating and he can die at any time,’ al Faran warned, turning the knife. His family should ‘rush to Srinagar immediately’ so that in the event of his death they could collect the body. Ramm and co. concluded that al Faran was deploying cod psychology, sending a pleading note loaded with pressure points to disguise the fact that its operation was on the ropes. But local journalists had a subtly different reading. This may have been pure theatre, the Kashmir media huddle concluded, but it had a concrete aim. Desperate for a deal after all these months, Sikander could see things dragging on interminably, with India relishing the kidnappers’ and Pakistan’s mounting discomfort. ‘Without the families present,’ Yusuf calculated, ‘there was no pressure on New Delhi to conclude the negotiations. This was Sikander’s stab at getting the women back to Srinagar to force the pace.’
No response came from New Delhi. But in Kashmir, Director General Sabharwal held another press conference. It was a one-line affair, with the police chief warning al Faran that trying to blackmail India and the hostages’ partners only served to expose them as savages. To ram this point home, and grab more column inches in the Indian media, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee commented: ‘This is a question of principle. We cannot subject ourselves to a situation that would encourage more kidnappings.’ In Church Lane, the Scotland Yard team was worried. ‘He’s right, but what is he saying to them in private?’ Roy Ramm recalled thinking. ‘We hoped he was saying something, otherwise he’d just slammed shut every door.’
In Spokane, Jane felt as if she was on the rack. The State Department advised her to stay put, its spokesman Nicholas Burns telling reporters at a White House briefing on the kidnapping, ‘We support the Indian government. We share its views that this hostage-taking cannot be condoned, cannot be justified and must be ended.’ Nobody had forgotten Don or the other hostages, he said. ‘We are hoping and praying for his release.’ Jane hoped they were also doing significantly more. In London, the Foreign Office was as inscrutable as ever, telling the Gazette in Middlesbrough: ‘It is very difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.’
IG Rajinder Tikoo, back in the Crime Branch hot seat, having returned from his compassionate leave of absence following the collapse of talks, was keeping his distance from the case. Nevertheless, he winced when he read Pranab Mukherjee’s statement, suspecting there was now no back channel to al Faran, and nothing was being said about the case at all, other than ‘public platitudes’.
‘What did Mukherjee know?’ Tikoo huffed. ‘Kashmir was nothing to do with principles, and all about managing threats by making concessions.’ Other kidnapping incidents had been ended after India had released prisoners, paid cash or provided some kind of collateral to militants who had then given up their captives. ‘So why not this time?’ His mind wandered back over the seventy-odd days he had spent holed up in Transport Lane attempting to resolve the crisis, only to come to the realisation that rather than trying to win, those above him were happier allowing Sikander and Pakistan to endlessly lose.
Jane spent Thanksgiving with Don’s family. Although she anguished over her decision not to return, she didn’t want to give al Faran the satisfaction of ‘jerking me back and forth between India and Spokane’. Since the alarming message on 17 November there had been nothing from the kidnappers’ camp. She used the holiday to fashion a joint statement with Julie, Cath and Anne that backed the position being maintained by the G4 nations in New Delhi. ‘You are punishing us for something that is out of our control,’ the women said, addressing al Faran directly. ‘Our governments have said that they will make no concessions to those who hold their citizens hostage, and that they will not urge other governments to make concessions.’
In the news vacuum, a few reporters headed along National Highway 1A to south Kashmir to see for themselves what was going on. Among them was Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian, who filed a report from Dudwagan, a bedraggled village twenty miles south-east of Anantnag, just south of Verinag, a natural spring around which the Emperor Jehangir had constructed a holiday retreat in the seventeenth century. Apart from a brief scramble over some rocks, reaching the village wasn’t that hard, Goldenberg reported. It didn’t take her long to get the locals talking either. ‘In this mountain hamlet … where white patches on children’s faces speak of chronic illness and malnutrition,’ she wrote, ‘the Britons Keith Mangan and Paul Wells spent Day 138 [19 November] as captives of Kashmiri separatist gunmen.’ The villagers told her that a few weeks previously, all four hostages had spent a night in the nearby hamlet of Kamar, on the other side of the Sandran River. For the families reading these reports back home, it seemed absurd. ‘If the journalists could find out the hostages were in such and such a village, why couldn’t the army or police do the same?’ asked Bob Wells, who simply could not understand what was holding the Indians back.
Something worried Goldenberg, who had made most of the running on this story. Dudwagan was close to an outpost of the Indo–Tibetan Border Police, an arm of the Indian security forces. The villagers told her that in recent months insurgents operating in their district had been on the run from ‘renegades’, some kind of secret armed force in the pay of the government. ‘What is so extraordinary about the hostages’ perambulations around Anantnag is that south Kashmir, once a hotbed of militancy, is now firmly in control of Indian security forces,’ Goldenberg reported, casting back to a recent statement in which al Faran had accused the Indian government of ‘throwing dust in the eyes of the world’.
Towards the end of November, the first heavy snow fell in Srinagar, and everything to do with the investigation became harder. Travelling even small distances in the valley took an age, while army jawans retreated to their braziers and the police and military top brass headed over the Pir Panjal mountains to their alternative headquarters in Jammu, the state’s milder winter capital, and villagers huddled indoors, having stocked up on firewood, kerosene and charcoal.
Just as the Squad thought they might, the kidnappers broke cover. In the last week of November, Sikander’s team contacted the Hurriyat Conference in Srinagar, an influential but prickly umbrella organisation representing Kashmiri separatist parties, asking it to get the Indians around a negotiating table. ‘How much clearer could they be?’ Yusuf Jameel recalled. ‘They wanted some kind of deal.’ For months, politicians aligned to Hurriyat, some of whom had links to militant outfits in the valley, had faced mounting pressure from the G4 group of nations to help end the hostage standoff. So far Hurriyat had refused, wary of being made to look like co-conspirators and having their movement tarnished by a criminal enterprise, aware of the Hindi proverb ‘Chor-chor mausere bhai’ – all thieves are cousins.
But al Faran wasn’t giving up. It issued a statement trying to force Hurriyat’s hand: ‘If the Hurriyat desires to save the lives of the four foreigners, it should come forward to mediate.’ Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Geelani, a wily strategist, privately wanted to end the crisis, which he could see was damaging Kashmir’s standing internationally. But publicly he wriggled, telling reporters his organisation could not mediate about the hostages’ release with a government that held tens of thousands of innocent Kashmiris prisoner too.
Two days later, al Faran ratcheted up the pressure, sending an emissary to Srinagar to meet with Hurriyat leaders and issuing another statement: ‘Until today we have faced a lot of difficulties ourselves and kept the four tourists as our esteemed guests. But we cannot keep the foreigners safe fo
r a long time.’ They claimed that they were under intense pressure, having recently suffered two fatalities in a firefight with Indian security forces, a story New Delhi vehemently denied. A second time, Hurriyat turned down the kidnappers’ request to act as mediators. Al Faran had started this, Hurriyat announced, ‘and al Faran could finish it’.
In Church Lane, Roy Ramm believed that all the signs pointed to al Faran being ready for a handover. They wanted out. If the reports from down south were true and the militant network had been secretly throttled by India, that handover was more likely to come sooner than later. A way out could be found, Ramm was certain, as long as India wanted one too.
By mid-November the Squad’s undercover agents had wriggled into Alpha’s inner circle in Shelipora. Most nights they sat drinking rum with Alpha’s field commanders and listening to the renegade strongman lecture his men about their priorities, in conversations that were relayed back to the detectives. ‘We are guns for democracy,’ Alpha told them without irony one frosty night. ‘Our task is to squeeze the remnants of the militancy so that the elections can go off without a hitch. Nothing else matters.’ Alpha was referring to India’s impending national polls, commencing in April 1996, in which the security situation in Kashmir was emerging as a key issue. Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had promised to quell the insurgency when he came to power in 1991, only for violence in the valley to have exploded. Then there was the Jammu and Kashmir state election, slated for the following September. That would end the much-hated Governor’s Rule, and would be the first poll Kashmiris had participated in for seven years. It would be a defining moment for the beleaguered state, one that politicians in New Delhi wanted to use to show that they had brought normality to the valley.