The Meadow

by Adrian Levy

  On 27 December Sahay and two other Indian negotiators touched down in Kandahar, where they learned that one of Masood Azhar’s brothers was among the hijackers, and his brother-in-law was in the back-up party in Nepal, which supplied the terrorists with cash and weapons. Seven agonising days later, with Indian television running back-to-back coverage of teary relatives camped outside the Prime Minister’s house in New Delhi, a deal was struck, India agreeing to give up three prisoners: Masood Azhar; Omar Sheikh, the Briton who had been the lure in the New Delhi kidnappings of October 1994; and Latram, the militant behind the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping in Kashmir in 1989.

  In Vermont, John Childs was incredulous when he heard the news: ‘I was devastated, and really angry. All the time we had been held, the Indians had said they couldn’t release any prisoners. And now, just like that, they had keeled over. That was when I finally realised we had all suffered unnecessarily because we were not famous or influential.’

  In the early hours of 31 December, Masood, in Ward Nine of Kot Bhalwal jail, woke to find prison officials swarming into his cell. By 11.30 a.m. he was sitting blindfolded and handcuffed next to Latram, in a helicopter piloted by Captain Jasminder Kahlon, who four years before had rescued John Childs from the mountains above Anantnag. Boarding a civilian jet in New Delhi, the two were joined by Omar Sheikh. ‘The plane taxis and within minutes takes off,’ Masood wrote later in a journal. ‘Startled, I listen to the announcement, “Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you on board the flight to Kandahar.”’

  The three prisoners shouted for joy: ‘Allahu akbar!’ Waiting to greet the prisoners at Kandahar was a senior representative of Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s one-eyed emir. That night, Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire who was also a guest of the Taliban, having fled his bolthole in Sudan in 1996, threw them a banquet, recalling how he and Masood had first worked together in Sudan in 1993. ‘The Believers are getting ready to celebrate,’ Masood wrote. ‘The preface to a new chapter of history is being written.’

  On 5 January 2000, Masood arrived back at the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, where thousands of supporters gathered, chanting ‘Naraay takbeer, Allahu akbar [Shout out aloud, God is great]!’ He told them: ‘My dear friends! What India wanted to destroy has reached glorious heights. Oh agents of RAW! You will not be able to catch us until we are sitting upon your own chest, waiting to slit your throat with our knives.’ Intentionally or not, his words evoked the slaughter of Hans Christian Ostrø. They were also a foretaste of what was to come. ‘My dear friends! My Musulman brothers! Greet me not with cries of “Zindabad” [long live]. For what is the use of living when a gun is hanging above the heads of unarmed, helpless Muslims of Kashmir? Raise the slogan of “Murdabad” [death be].’ With a flourish, Masood concluded: ‘We haven’t come to this world to lead comfortable lives. If you do marry, marry for jihad; have children, but for jihad; earn wealth for jihad; bring up your sons for jihad. I have come alone … but I will leave here with men who can fight a war.’ His followers moved through the crowd, enlisting recruits to join a new outfit: Jaish-e-Mohammed (the Army of Mohammed).

  Masood’s Army struck three months later in Kashmir, launching the first-ever suicide bombing in Srinagar, outside the army headquarters at BB Cantt. The bomber was Asif Sadiq, a twenty-four-year-old student from Birmingham who had been recruited through contacts Masood had forged during his trips to the UK in the early nineties. More European volunteers were waiting to do the same, Masood warned before heading back to Bahawalpur, where the following year he watched in awe as the Twin Towers fell, following the live television coverage with his father, Master Alvi.

  In Spokane, Jane Schelly watched too, sickened and horrified by the al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington DC. They came just four days before a final memorial ceremony she had arranged for Don: accompanied by fellow climbers from Spokane Mountaineers, she would scatter wildflower seeds on the summit of a local peak, in lieu of her husband’s ashes, Don’s grave never having been located. As America mourned its dead, Jane decided they should go ahead anyway, paying tribute to a man whose abduction had, it now appeared, signalled the commencement of a new kind of war. ‘I would hope we don’t do something retaliatory and foolish,’ Jane told a local newspaper reporter who asked her, as a victim of Islamic terrorism, what the US should do next. ‘In spite of my husband’s murder, I don’t think violence is the solution.’

  America did not listen. Masood too was planning more attacks. Three weeks after 9/11, his Army of Mohammed set off a devastating car bomb in Srinagar, killing thirty-eight people. India claimed that this was just a warm-up for a headline-grabbing spectacular on 13 December 2001, when Masood’s outfit allegedly sent five men on a suicidal mission to attack the Indian parliament in the heart of New Delhi, knowing that footage of the event would be seen around the world. India, that would be accused of failing to adequately investigate this raid, in which twelve people died, including the gunmen, described it as ‘a wake-up call’. The Army of Mohammed was outlawed by the US, and banned in Pakistan too. Masood was briefly put under house arrest, before being freed ‘for lack of evidence’.

  On 23 January 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was exploring the connections between Pakistan intelligence agencies, Masood’s new breed of British-born jihadis and their spiritual guides in Karachi, when he vanished. The next time he was seen was in a photograph, with a gun to his head. Emails from his captors were linked by investigators to Omar Sheikh, Masood’s British recruit. Since being freed as a result of the Flight 814 hijacking, Sheikh had been working with Masood’s Army and also al Qaeda, drawing Pearl into the kidnappers’ trap just as he had done with the tourists in New Delhi in 1994. Sheikh was arrested in Pakistan three weeks after Pearl disappeared, and admitted to his role in the abduction, but claimed the American journalist had been passed to another gang, whose members included Amjad Farooqi, a former Masood bodyguard who had helped hijack Flight 814.

  The kidnappers released a video showing Pearl reading from a forced confession. Then, in a reprise of what had happened to Hans Christian Ostrø in the snowbound forests of the Pir Panjal, a masked figure was filmed cutting off Pearl’s head. His dismembered corpse was found three months later, north of Karachi.

  Omar Sheikh was convicted of murdering Daniel Pearl and sentenced to death in July 2002. He appealed, but is still awaiting a hearing. In 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a senior al Qaeda operative who was captured in Rawalpindi in March 2003 and transported to Guantánamo Bay, confessed to the FBI that he had slit Pearl’s throat while the hijacker Amjad Farooqi had held him down.

  Masood’s network orchestrated two more suicide bombings in Karachi, and was connected to twin suicide attacks in December 2003 on the motorcade of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan as it passed through Rawalpindi. The alleged mastermind, who had a twenty-five-million-rupee (£200,000) reward placed on his head, was Masood’s protégé Amjad Farooqi. Masood was tracked down and placed under house arrest in Bahawalpur, only to be released yet again on the grounds of ‘insufficient evidence’. By this time he was thinking about targets further afield.

  In September 2004 Pakistani forces cornered Amjad Farooqi in a house in Karachi, where he died in a gun battle. Two months later two young Muslims from Leeds, Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan, arrived in Pakistan, ostensibly to attend an Islamic studies course in Punjab. Instead they met a member of Masood’s Army, who took them to the LeT for three months’ terrorist training. Back in the UK in February 2005, Tanweer and Khan teamed up with a third British Pakistani, Hasib Hussain, and Germaine Lindsay, a British convert to Islam. During the London morning rush hour of 7 July 2005, the four blew themselves up, killing fifty-two people and injuring more than seven hundred.

  Masood was still not satisfied. Thirteen months later, in August 2006, Rashid Rauf from Birmingham, whose father had been courted by Masood during his British tours of the nineties and who had married into Masood’s extended clan, was arre
sted in Bahawalpur. Rauf was wanted by English police in connection with the murder of an uncle, but had also been inducted into Masood’s burgeoning terror front, assembling an operation to bring down transatlantic airliners with liquid bombs smuggled on board in soft-drink bottles.

  After Rauf’s arrest, two dozen further suspects would be picked up across the UK, with three men eventually being convicted of conspiracy to murder. In December 2007 Rauf escaped his armed guard in Pakistan, vanishing into the cauldron of the tribal areas, where the US claimed he was killed in a drone strike in November 2008, although his body was never found.

  Masood Azhar vanished too. He has outlived almost all of his contemporaries in terror, including Osama bin Laden, while many more are now in jail, among them Omar Sheikh, in Hyderabad in Pakistan. Others, like Langrial, who was released in February 2011, having spent eighteen years in custody without trial, are broken figures. Not Masood. Videos of his recent sermons continue to appear on YouTube and are debated in blogs, while his writings on jihad are disseminated via chat rooms. Click a mouse and download his call to arms: ‘Will you accompany me in this field? Inshallah! Instead of shaking hands with each other, fill your arms with lightning.’

  Today, the plump preacher from Bahawalpur has attained the kind of immortality he was seeking since childhood, while the four Western hostages who became both a spur and a benchmark for his organisation – Don Hutchings, Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and Dirk Hasert – are long forgotten, buried in graves that no Kashmiri has dared to identify and no Indian agency has been empowered to locate.

  That may change. In murky Kashmir, after two decades of rumours about the fate of an estimated ten thousand missing people (including the four Western backpackers), at least three times the number that vanished under Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, a rare moment of clarity has recently emerged.

  It followed a five-year slog by Kashmiri activists led by Parvez Imroz, a courageous lawyer from Srinagar who began, unpaid and under threat from the security forces, to elicit secrets from villagers, persuading them to identify and map secret graves scattered throughout the valley that contained, Imroz believed, some of the disappeared.

  On 2 July 2011 a Senior Superintendent of Police, Bashir Ahmed Yatoo, whose career had hitherto been distinguished mainly by his loyalty to the state, revealed the results of the first official inquiry into Imroz’s claims, before the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), a government body not known for being outspoken. SSP Yatoo’s team said it had identified thirty-eight unmarked mass graves in north Kashmir, scattered through the pine forests and mossy mountain pastures. In them, according to eyewitnesses, lay at least 2,730 bodies. Of these, Yatoo said, 574 had already been identified as civilians unconnected to the insurgency, people who had been plucked from their homes, vehicles or workplaces by the Indian security forces and killed.

  Leaked to the press, Yatoo’s findings thundered across the valley, prompting villagers to do something no one had done since before 1989. They began to talk openly about how corpses, sometimes burned, headless or mutilated, had frequently been foisted on them by the Indian security forces. ‘Bury them somewhere, and don’t say a word,’ was how Atta Mohammed, a sixty-eight-year-old apple farmer from Kupwara in the north, recalled the Indian security forces putting it as they pulled the canvas back on their olive-green Ashok Leyland truck to reveal the first batch of bloody cadavers. Over the years, he says, they delivered 203 bodies, which this pious man had washed and buried in a copse. All of them were Kashmiri men and boys, not militants from Pakistan, as he was told.

  The truth-telling would continue. On 16 September, retired District Judge Javed Kawos, the SHRC’s chairman, blindsided the authorities in Srinagar and New Delhi by ordering a widespread programme to identify all of the dead, using DNA analysis and other forensic tools, and an inquiry aimed at finding those culpable in the security forces. ‘Prosecutions to bring to justice perpetrators of crimes, shall be undertaken,’ he ordered.

  SSP Yatoo was called before the SHRC in the last week of September 2011. He was not retracting his report, he said – in fact he had more to add: ‘There is every possibility that [all of these] unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves may contain the victims of enforced disappearances.’

  The news of mass graves being uncovered, and the prospect of at least some of the truth about what had gone on in Kashmir being revealed at last, electrified much of the subcontinent. TV crews and their satellite vans were dispatched to report on the unfolding events. Plain-clothed government intelligence agents closely monitored the activities of big-name Indian journalists, the shiny household faces of the cable TV channels who were now followed all over the valley. Other arms of the state tried to threaten eyewitnesses in remote rural areas, but the villagers and farmers refused to be cowed, one schoolteacher brazenly telling reporters: ‘We told the thugs who approached us that the times are different. Better watch out.’

  After so many years of silence, and with the militants having dwindled, by the army’s reckoning, to a band of just 119 active foreign fighters, there was suddenly a rush of eyewitness testimonies. These enabled lawyers to put together a second submission to the SHRC, covering two more Kashmiri districts, Rajouri and Poonch, and another four thousand unmarked graves. One was said to stretch across an entire field, and contained more than 2,500 corpses, according to those who had been forced to dig it, with no one able to say who these bodies belonged to.

  SSP Yatoo called on the SHRC to sanction a survey of the entire state, a mass investigation that would reach across the southern Pir Panjal, above Anantnag, and into isolated villages like Mati Gawran, the gateway to frozen Mardan Top to which Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk had been driven, and where they had been executed.

  Once the renegades’ domain, this area is now almost free of them. The Clerk was cut down in a machine-gun ambush on the road to Vailoo in 2000. He was buried in consecrated ground by his family, only for villagers to repeatedly dig him up and cast his remains out. Alpha, who twice unsuccessfully stood in elections, was shot dead outside his home in Shelipora by unidentified gunmen in 2001. Bismillah survives, guarded by gunmen and elected as a local politician. He jokes: ‘No one dared not vote for me.’ The Tiger, too, somehow outwitted his many enemies, but is now unemployed, and spends his days in drunken penury, sleeping in a paramilitary police camp.

  In their place, a building movement for reconciliation is emerging, that might just come up with the truth, and locate many more bodies. As a result of the thaw in Kashmir, for the first time members of the old al Faran Squad have spilled secrets they had been forced to sit on for sixteen years about a case they believed they had solved but whose conclusions were so stark that they too were buried. Their sources too have come out into the open – the agents and informers who helped piece together the complex Crime Branch investigation that can only really be laid to rest when Don, Keith, Dirk and Paul’s remains are found.

  Searching for the appropriate words with which to address the silent masses in the security services, the villagers in the deep countryside, the law enforcers and policy-makers in Srinagar and New Delhi, SSP Yatoo eventually found some that applied just as well to the many vanished Kashmiris as to the abduction and disappearance of five Western trekkers, a crime that transformed this Himalayan paradise, in the eyes of the West, into a cauldron of Islamic terror. ‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead,’ Yatoo said in September 2011, quoting William Gladstone, ‘and I will measure the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.’

  The route to the Meadow, a photograph taken by Norwegian trekker Hans Christian Ostrø shortly before he was kidnapped on 4 July 1995.

  (Left to right) Julie and Keith Mangan together with Catherine Moseley trek towards the Meadow in early July 1995. PHOTO BY PAUL WELLS.

  (Left to right) Cath, Keith and Julie trek towards the Meadow. PHOTO BY PAUL WELLS.

  Setting up
camp en route to the Meadow, Keith and Julie standing by their tent in the foreground. PHOTO BY PAUL WELLS.

  Hans Christian Ostrø being made up as his character Bima for his kathakali dance graduation show in Sreekrishnapuram, May 1995. Ostrø spent five months training to be a kathakali master in southern India before travelling to Kashmir in June 1995.

  Hans Christian Ostrø on board Montana houseboat, Dal Lake, Srinagar, where he stayed shortly before he was kidnapped.

  The Heeven Hotel in Pahalgam. Kashmiri police alleged that ‘Sikander’, al Faran’s commander, was sheltered here, unbeknown to the hotel’s owners.

  The wives and girlfriends of the kidnapped men leaving the first press conference at the Welcome Hotel in Srinagar on 13 July 1995. (Left to right) Cath, Jane Schelly (wife of Don Hutchings), Julie, Anne Henning (girlfriend of Dirk Hasert). An unidentified diplomatic liaison officer accompanies them.

  Rajinder Tikoo, Inspector General of Crime Branch at the time of the kidnappings.

  Members of the al Faran kidnap party.

  One of the first hostage photographs taken by al Faran. It was shot outside the herders’ hut from which American hostage John Childs had escaped in the early hours of 8 July 1995. The remaining three original hostages (left to right) Don, Keith and Paul are flanked by new hostages Dirk Hasert (left) and Hans Christian Ostrø (right), both seized on 8 July. The photograph was delivered to reporters in Srinagar on 12 July.

  Security Advisor Lt. Gen. D. D. Saklani briefs police officials before they begin an aerial search for the five Western hostages on Tuesday, 18 July 1995. Saklani had found American John Childs in the same helicopter the week before.