Authors: Adrian Levy
The houseboat owner was disappointed when Ostrø announced two days after arriving that he was leaving for Amarnath, alone. Mir had tried to talk him into taking a guide, concerned about the commission he would be losing – and a little worried that this ‘likeable but naïve’ foreigner would get into trouble. But the Norwegian was firm. ‘I have my knife,’ he laughed, waving his army-issue bayonet. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Ostrø had also made some checks, visiting the Indian government tourism offices in New Delhi and the J&K tourist office in Srinagar, where a tourist policeman had done his best to sell him the services of a guide. He showed Mir the officer’s card: Nasser Ahmed Jan. ‘Call me if you have any trouble,’ Jan had said, as he did to everyone, handing him the business card. Mir said the same as
Ostrø boarded the Pahalgam bus. ‘I told him, “Good luck. Make sure to come and stay with us on the way back down.”’
Ostrø arrived in Pahalgam on 1 July, the same day as John Childs. The next morning Childs, Ostrø and the party consisting of Julie and Keith Mangan, Paul Wells and Cath Moseley had separately trekked up to the Meadow, all of them leaving at different times and camping in different locations. The photographs recovered from Ostrø’s unprocessed film showed several mountain beauty spots where he had stopped en route.
Childs had headed to Kolahoi on 3 July, as Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had set out north-west for Tar Sar, while as far as Yusuf could establish, Ostrø had returned to Pahalgam, meaning that he was lucky enough to be out of the Meadow when the kidnappers struck the following evening. In Pahalgam he had stayed at the Lidder Palace, a wooden hotel overlooking the town’s golf course beside the East Lidder River. Its owner, Yaqoob Sheikh, had rented the foreigner a tent, keeping his Air India ticket for London as a guarantee that he would return it in a fortnight’s time. Sheikh also tried to rent him a guide, but he had refused, saying he wanted to be alone. He spent most of the following day, 4 July, writing postcards to his family and wandering around Pahalgam taking snaps, coming back at around 10 p.m., a few hours after events unfolded in the Meadow.
The next morning, 5 July, Ostrø had woken at 6 a.m., according to Sheikh, and left Pahalgam by seven, saying he was eager to reach the heights above Chandanwari. He had taken a ride in a jeep taxi part of the way up the East Lidder River route, a journey he also photographed; the films were eventually handed over to DSP Haider, who later gave them to Ostrø’s family. What this told Yusuf was that Ostrø had gone from being charmed to becoming the most unlucky hostage of all. If he had stayed just a little longer in Pahalgam, or had overslept that morning, he would have witnessed the emotional arrival of Jane, Julie and Cath in the town to report the kidnappings in the Meadow. In his eagerness to get into the mountains, he had missed them by a few crucial hours.
On the evening of 5 July Ostrø had pitched camp in the countryside outside Chandanwari. He left the next day before 7 a.m., heading for Sheshnag. He had stopped off for tea in remote Zargibal, to and from which no news travelled fast, and where no one would hear about the kidnappings for days to come. Zargibal was in a different time zone, villagers joked: clocks there were set forty-eight hours behind those elsewhere in the valley. ‘It was a second stroke of bad luck for Hans Christian Ostrø that he had not pressed on to Amarnath as originally planned,’ says Yusuf. Ostrø had stopped to make friends, settled a while, and then, like Don, Keith, John, Paul and Dirk, had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
12 July, 11 a.m. Yusuf pored over a trekking map of the Kashmiri Himalayas, trying to work out how far the kidnappers and their hostages might have got in the last four days. In the absence of police intelligence, everyone in the Press Enclave was doing the same, working on the assumption that the main kidnap party could not have been far away when Dirk Hasert and Hans Christian Ostrø were seized between Chandanwari and Zargibal on 8 July. If they had set out at full pelt from the heights above Zargibal on the afternoon of 8 July, as soon as Ostrø had been captured, walking and climbing a maximum of ten miles a day, they could be anywhere within a forty-mile radius by now. That gave searchers a circle whose diameter was eighty miles long, which meant covering an area of five thousand square miles – if anybody
was
actually searching.
Just as Yusuf was contemplating the difficulty in finding the hostages, and the necessity of a negotiated settlement with al Faran, the phone rang: ‘
Vaaray chivaa
.’ He jumped, recognising the southern burr instantly, took a deep breath, and kicked the door shut. Sikander. The message was brief: a packet was coming. The usual drop-off. Then the phone went dead. Yusuf sent Farooq Khan, a
Kashmir Times
photographer, out to do the collection. Several hours later he returned to the Press Enclave clutching a manila envelope. It had been deposited by the wayside from a passing motorbike at a busy crossroads opposite Jamia Masjid, the most important mosque
in Srinagar. These days, anonymous drop-offs were considered by the militants to be far safer than a traceable phone call or a meeting. For now, it looked as if the Press Enclave was ahead of the Jammu and Kashmir Police.
Yusuf ripped open the envelope. Inside were two almost identical photos. The first, in colour, showed Don, Keith and Paul, their hands looped together with flimsy-looking twine, making their detention appear a symbolic affair. The twine’s ends were loosely held by heavily armed militants, whose faces had been scratched out, although their figures were clearly visible, giving away some identifiable clues: a woolly Afghan
pakul
cap, bodies swathed in blankets worn over
kurta
pyjamas, suggesting that they were somewhere high and windy. Their wild, straggly hair and uncombed beards harked back to the days of the Afghan
mujahideen
, givng the entire composition a theatrical rather than a menacing air.
Keith Mangan sat at the centre of the group, showing a week’s worth of stubble and still wearing his wife’s purple bomber jacket. To his left was Paul Wells, his long hair hanging loosely around his shoulders. After more than a week of trudging, sleeping rough and bad food, there was no mistaking his look of resignation: this was no longer a game. To the right of Keith was Don Hutchings in his trademark blue fleecy hat and Gore-Tex trousers, looking drawn and tired. Was he still
chacha
(uncle), Yusuf wondered as he pondered these by-now familiar faces, or were the stresses and strains of their continued incarceration since John Childs’ midnight flit beginning to grate on them all? The three of them sat on a bench against the dry-stone wall of a
dhoka
, staring placidly, putting up with being posed for a photograph probably taken with one of their own cameras.
The second photo showed the same
dhoka
and the same rope trick, but this time two new hostages had been squeezed into the line-up: Dirk Hasert, in a white sweatshirt, loose trousers and walking boots, at one end, his hair shorn, a modest goatee beard, his head tilted slightly to the right; at the other end, Hans Christian Ostrø wearing a white-and-purple batik shirt he had bought in New Delhi, his
expression irritable, as if he was still coming to terms with being roughly handled in Zargibal.
Yusuf could only draw one conclusion, which was confirmed many years later by John Childs when he studied these pictures together for the first time. They had probably been taken on the same crucial day, 8 July, the first being snapped on the morning of John’s escape, and the second after the search party had returned later from Chandanwari and Zargibal, with two new captives to replace the one who had slipped away. ‘I could almost hear the kidnappers talking when I saw the second picture,’ John said. ‘“We lost one, but never mind, we got two more.”’ The pictures also gave a glimpse into what had been unfolding up in the mountains. Yusuf reasoned that the
dhoka
in the photos must have been the one from which John fled. Don, Keith and Paul must have sat there all day, waiting for the search party to return, unsure of their fate. It was a crucial piece of evidence. Armed with this picture, John Childs could possibly lead a search party back to the location, or identify it from a helicopter. There were many such huts on the mountains, but given what was known about the likely route taken by the kidnappers, searchers could whittle them down if they got a move on.
Yusuf pressed his contacts to find out where John Childs was. The information that came back shocked him: Childs was on his way back to the US. Yusuf and the other journalists could not believe it. Knowing nothing of John’s repeated attempts to get an army search team up into the mountains within minutes of his being rescued, the local journalists simply concluded, like many others involved in the drama, that the American could not wait to return to his loved ones. And John, being John, kept his mouth shut: ‘I just ran away from all the journalists. I did not want to tell my story, or how I was pushed out of town despite asking to be taken back into the mountains.’
One of the few still in Srinagar who knew the truth was Saklani’s police liaison, Altaf Ahmed, who later claimed that he and Saklani had wanted to go along with Childs’ plan as soon as they rescued him from the ridge above Pissu Top. ‘We all said, “Let’s go over the hills to find the location of the others,”’ he said many years later. ‘But as soon
as we got Childs back to Srinagar, a woman from the American Embassy arrived and made it very clear that they were taking him out. “We’re leaving in twenty-four hours,” she told us. And we had no choice about it.’ To Yusuf, it didn’t really matter whose version was right. The plain fact was that the only living link to the remaining hostages was gone.
As well as the two photographs, there was a note inside Sikander’s envelope that rammed this point home. Signed ‘al Faran’, for which Yusuf read the Movement, it stated that the five hostages would be killed in the next thirty-six hours if the Indian government failed to release the twenty-one militants listed on the scrap of paper that had been handed to Jane Schelly on 5 July. Reading the message, Yusuf was reminded of a similar demand he had seen back in June 1994, after Kim Housego and David Mackie had been seized. But this time the language was more aggressive, with the kidnappers directly threatening to kill the hostages. Did this reflect pressure on Sikander to make things work, second time around? Yusuf was worried about this confrontational stance. New Delhi did not deal with confrontation well, and there seemed little room to manoeuvre. However, he was a journalist, and this was a big story. He had to stop worrying and get on with his job, preparing a report based on this letter drop – and then wait for the fallout.
That night, at his villa down Church Lane, beside the Jhelum River and the cricket ground, General Saklani called a meeting of the Unified Command. As they scraped their chairs across the polished parquet, there was only one item for discussion among the generals, inspector generals and director generals: the fate of the five hostages still in the mountains. Even before the unexpected appearance of the photographs of the hostages, things had become increasingly fraught as a result of the seizure of Hasert and Ostrø. There were now four foreign countries involved, where before it had only been the British and Americans. That meant four diplomatic liaison officers in Srinagar, all levelling questions on behalf of the families, and submitting formal requests for a phalanx of back-up staff waiting in
New Delhi to travel to Srinagar: hostage negotiators, search-and-rescue teams, intelligence officers, military advisors, psychiatrists, medics. Saklani told the meeting he had spent the best part of the afternoon fielding calls from the chiefs of mission in the Indian capital.
He had other irritants. Having forced the pace over the evacuation of John Childs from Srinagar, the US Ambassador, Frank Wisner, was now throwing his weight around concerning Don Hutchings, demanding the right to send in a Delta Force rescue team, the Special Operations Group of the US military responsible for counter-terrorism. He also requested that an FBI unit be allowed to travel north to comb the valley for evidence, with a view to trying the kidnappers at some stage in a US court, given that American citizens had been targeted. Hindu nationalist politicians from the BJP were protesting about sovereignty and Indian pride, making it unlikely that the American requests would get far with Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. And that was before the Indian Army weighed in, pointing out that if anyone was going to launch a military operation or a rescue mission it would be Indian-managed and Indian-led. The army was Saklani’s family, and he knew what the view would be from the canteen in Mhow: ‘It was India’s prerogative to deal with the kidnappings. India had a mature army and a full-fledged democratic political system. It did not need assistance or coaching or mediation from old colonial masters or new-money powers.’
To further complicate matters, Saklani also had the world’s media on his back. Srinagar was overflowing with news crews, all of them demanding updates. In the absence of any official responses they were issuing increasingly damaging reports, based on speculation and rumour. One, quoting an unnamed source, asserted that the hostages were in danger of being shot by Indian ‘hunter killer’ patrols who, it was claimed, had been sweeping the mountains in preparation for the
yatra
pilgrimage.
Back in the UK, that particular story had become front-page news. Julie Mangan’s mother, Anita Sullivan, reacted furiously: ‘These reports are being put out to frighten the families and help the captors
get their demands.’ Saklani had had the British Ambassador on the line just that afternoon.
You could not make up publicity this bad, Saklani told the gathered security chiefs. At the start he had been happy to ‘let the hares run’, as he liked to say, allowing idle speculation, however wild. But now he had a responsibility to make sure that on the international stage India looked as if it had this situation under control. They all did, he said. They would have to give the foreign and local media something to chew on. He proposed putting up the wives and girlfriends in a big, emotional press conference that would also give them a chance to speak directly to the Kashmiri people, something the women, frustrated at the lack of progress, had been demanding for days. A press conference would give Saklani the opportunity to straighten things out and reiterate the official line that everything that could be done was being done. The idea was mooted, rejected, beaten up, thrown out, and finally voted back in again.