by Adrian Levy
As a parting gesture to cap the surreal mountain hike, Kim was given a gift, a clock that bore an inscription comparing the Indian Army to the Nazis: ‘Teacher – Hitler; Pupils – Indian Occupational Forces; with Best Wishes to Kim Housego from Harkat ul-Ansar International’. A few minutes later a grinning Mushtaq Ali emerged from the building, his arm around Kim’s shoulder. Before taking the former hostages back to Srinagar, where their families were waiting, Mushtaq joked with Sikander’s emissary, asking if they could now eat the watermelon. The militant shook his head, and cracked the fruit open to reveal a hand grenade concealed inside. ‘My instructions were to kill you all if we were betrayed,’ he said, before discarding the melon and vanishing into the woods.
The story of the kidnapping did not end there. Still determined to win the freedom of Masood, the Afghani and Langrial, the Movement had struck again, this time in New Delhi in October 1994. Sikander had not been involved in this operation, as the Movement had instead used a British-Pakistani recruit, Omar Sheikh, who had been educated at the London School of Economics, and who used his familiarity with Western ways to lure three British and one American backpacker away from their guesthouses in the travellers’ enclave of Paharganj opposite New Delhi railway station, where Paul Wells and Cath Moseley would later stay. The Movement had issued a ransom note demanding the release of the three imprisoned militants, this one signed by a fictional group, al Hadid, meaning ‘the blade’. However, the plot was foiled when police investigating an unrelated report of a burglary stumbled across Sheikh’s hideout, leading to his capture and the freeing of the hostages, some of whom told of being chained to the floor, an indication of the increasing violence being meted out by an ever-hardening Movement.
After the New Delhi kidnapping there had been a lull. Until now: 4 July 1995, and this call from someone Yusuf was certain was Sikander. He cast his eye down the list of twenty-one names dictated to him. Here was the proof he was looking for. This time round the kidnappers were making the same demands as before. They wanted Masood, the Afghani and Langrial freed. And beneath their names was that of the British recruit Omar Sheikh, who was currently languishing in the high-security wing at Tihar jail, in New Delhi. It was clear to Yusuf what was going on: al Faran was the Movement, and the Movement was al Faran. Sikander, whose jihadi career to date had involved three separate kidnappings, had launched the Movement’s third serious attempt to win the freedom of Masood Azhar and his comrades. But for now, as Yusuf prepared to file to the BBC, he kept most of this to himself. He needed to back up his surmises. Instead, his report would stick to the bare bones of the story.
Dirk Hasert and Anne Hennig, a young German couple taking a break from their college studies in Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Thuringia, knew none of this when they reached Dal Lake in Srinagar on 4 July. They had met as students a year earlier, during a film screening at Erfurt’s Anger Kino, and had come on holiday to Kashmir to widen their horizons.
Anne was a couple of years Dirk’s junior, but they had hit it off straight away, sharing a love of art-house movies and a desire to get away from the decaying eastern side of reunified Germany. Dirk had grown up in Bad Langensalza, an insular medieval city near Erfurt. The youngest and most rebellious of Christa Hasert’s three children, he had found it claustrophobic and depressing.
Dirk had longed to turn his back on what he saw as the dead-end Eastern Bloc. While his older brother Berndt and sister Birgit followed a more conventional route, he buried himself in magazines smuggled in from the West, imagining what it would be like to travel. After just scraping through his Arbitur exams, the German matriculation, Dirk made what his brother Berndt called ‘a break for freedom’, moving to the big city of Erfurt, where he chose vocational training over university. Berndt said: ‘Dirk didn’t stick at anything, and spent his days casting around Erfurt for something more fulfilling.’ Then, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, setting the twenty-year-old free.
Dirk immediately got a passport, saved up to buy an InterRail card and embraced his new freedom, pushing his budget as far as it would stretch, at one stage reaching Turkey. Gradually he stopped calling his siblings altogether, although he still contacted his mother once in a while. She was too old to change, he said: ‘Too much water under the bridge.’ She would never move away from Bad Langensalza.
At twenty-five, Dirk tried to figure out how to raise more money, in order to travel further and for longer. He went back into education, getting onto a degree course in social education at Erfurt Polytechnic. That summer, 1994, before college started, he had made his most adventurous trip yet, a solo voyage to Iran and Afghanistan. ‘Everything he saw transformed his view of the world, sparking a fascination with religion, politics and spirituality,’ Berndt said. Dirk began his studies that autumn energised, and fell for an ethereal first-year student, Anne Hennig. ‘The region fascinated him,’ she recalled. ‘It was all Dirk would talk about for hours.’ She shared his curiosity, but was not so driven to explore. He was particularly interested in Islam, captivated by the way devout Muslims lived their religion, unlike Christians. Having coaxed Anne into coming with him on his next big adventure to witness Islam in its raw state, much as Paul Wells would talk Cath Moseley into going to Ladakh, Dirk began planning their trip for the following summer. After reading up on Asia and poring over maps, they agreed on Kashmir.
Stopping off in New Delhi at the end of June 1995, and feeling nervous about travelling to the valley, they had gone to the government tourism office to get advice. ‘Dirk was very careful,’ reflected Anne. They were given the usual reassuring story: ‘Stay out of downtown Srinagar and you’ll have the holiday of a lifetime.’ ‘And it looked like paradise in the travel guides we saw,’ said Anne, although like everyone else they were shocked when they flew in to Srinagar airport. ‘It was suddenly machine guns, razor wire and sandbags.’ As the J&K tourism police at the airport quizzed them – names, passports, hotel, itinerary – and Anne looked out into a crowd of unsmiling bearded faces, she began to get cold feet. ‘There were threatening signs,’ she said, worried by the overwhelming military presence.
However, once they reached Dal Lake, life slowed down on the calming waters. The people were open, the mountain views uplifting. They tried once again to pin down the facts, calling at the J&K state tourism office on 5 July, the day after the kidnappings. ‘Everyone assured us it would be OK,’ said Anne, unaware at the time that just a few blocks away in the UN guesthouse Jane Schelly, Julie Mangan and Cath Moseley were going through hell explaining their partners’ abductions. Dirk and Anne were advised by a policeman, Nasser Ahmed Jan, to head for Pahalgam, ‘which was where other Westerners were happily going’. He said he would contact them if the situation changed, and waved them out, even though the newspaper on his desk was reporting the Pahalgam abductions and that the day before DSP Kifayat Haider had, unsuccessfully, recommended to his superiors that the trekking routes above Pahalgam be cleared of all Western holidaymakers.
Dirk and Anne were on holiday. They were not reading newspapers. They had asked officials for their views, and had heard nothing about the kidnapping of Don, Keith, Paul and John. On 6 July, the day news of the events in Kashmir was broadcast around the world, Dirk and Anne left Srinagar at dawn, taking the bus to Pahalgam, just missing the breaking story. Pony-wallahs and guides crowded around them when they arrived in the trekking town around noon. Instead of telling them to turn back, men who were desperate for business vied with each other to describe the wonderful sights the German couple would see camping beyond the ridgelines. No one mentioned Jane, Julie and Cath’s dramatic arrival in Pahalgam the previous day.
Dirk and Anne started out the next day, following in the footsteps of Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings along the Amarnath route. Up in the mountains it was ‘incredibly quiet and peaceful’, Anne recalled. But at the mountain village of Chandanwari they were slightly disconcerted to see droves of Indian soldiers. ‘It was certainly irritating that so
many military people were around, but who could take notice of that in such a magnificent landscape?’ Anne said. Coming from a country that had been divided, the couple had lived with uniforms their entire lives, and they were advised that these troops were preparing for a Hindu pilgrimage whose route needed securing. The soldiers themselves did not stop to talk, but just waved at the foreigners, ushering them on and up, higher into the mountains. ‘There was no reason to worry,’ said Anne. ‘There seemed to be everything to live for.’ So they pressed on, camping on the night of 7 July just outside Chandanwari, going to bed early since they had dawn plans. As they lay in each other’s arms they talked about Pissu Top, the high-altitude pass they hoped to cross the following day. And of Zargibal, a small hamlet of stone houses and a mountain stream where it was said one could pitch a tent and get a near-perfect view of the seven peaks of Sheshnag. How glad he was that they had made it this far, Anne remembered Dirk whispering to her, just before they fell into a deep sleep.
SEVEN
Up and Down
8 July, just after midnight. Was he the only one awake, John Childs wondered. As he lay huddled under a couple of thin horse blankets next to his fellow captives, it was difficult to say. Just like every other night they had endured, the hostages were hemmed in on all sides by clumps of wheezing, scratching and snoring insurgents, more than a dozen men and boys in total. Their Kalashnikovs were stacked against the walls, while they kept their pistols and knives jammed into their waistbands or close at hand throughout the night. The situation was as close to a nightmare as John could imagine, cooped up at uncomfortably close quarters in a pungent, smoke-filled gujjar hut somewhere in the Kashmiri mountains, who knew how many miles from safety, with no sign of rescue. For the past four days and nights his every move, his every bodily need, had been controlled by these rough strangers, who he had begun to hate with a passion. ‘I came from America, the land of the free,’ he said. ‘And now I had to ask some idiot kid with a rifle for permission to urinate, to speak, even to wash my hands before eating. I was stunned by the loss of freedom. This is what struck me most. The thing that pained me.’ But having got over his self-pity, John was determined to get out.
After four days in their company, he was still not sure who his captors represented, or what they wanted. They appeared to be some kind of mujahideen, like the turbanned gunmen he’d read of fighting in Afghanistan. Two of them claimed to be veterans, without saying which conflict they had fought in, or on what side. Some of the younger ones had let the odd fact slip during unguarded moments. One said he came from Gilgit, which John knew was somewhere in the Pakistani mountains. Another said he was from ‘the tribal areas’, which probably placed him on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. Other than that, there had been little talking. The leader had seen to it that his men kept their distance and said little. ‘Shut up, keep quiet!’ he had barked every time he caught the hostages exchanging whispers, gesturing with his pistol.
One thing was clear. These men had known no life other than the mountains or the battlefield: washing only to pray, defecating wherever, charging up mountains in plastic sandals, spending the evenings obsessively cleaning their weapons. ‘Some of the younger ones were just teenagers,’ said John. They made a few attempts to ask about cricket, bands, life in Britain and the US. John had decided right at the start to smile through it, and not to be the one who caused trouble. ‘I didn’t want that responsibility, I didn’t want to anger my captors. I just wanted out of this. I left the bolshiness to Paul.’
But on the inside, John was fighting himself. ‘All I kept thinking was how stupid I’d been, too proud to accept I’d made a mistake in going to Srinagar, too arrogant to turn around when it was staring me in the face that this was not an appropriate holiday destination. Now I was stuck, and as far as I was concerned, no one was coming to rescue us.’ He could not block out the thought that less than a week earlier he’d been in a suit and tie in Calcutta, pondering a break in the Himalayas. Now he was trapped, and distrustful of everyone – including, if he was honest, the other hostages. How could he rely on men he did not know?
John focused on the kidnappers, trying to work out the pecking order and their rituals, noticing how reverentially they acted around the leader. ‘He was sinister-looking, with a long, narrow face, a hawkish nose and an expression that gave nothing away. Unlike some of the others, who got excitable or panicked, the leader was cool, and spoke near-perfect English. Fair-skinned, with a long beard and hair, he had a stillness about him that, enhanced by his aquiline profile and robes, gave him the aura of an educated aesthete. He seemed to have come from privilege, but to have been brought down by war to something more basic.’ John felt that this man had chosen his path, and that he was capable of anything. Many years later John would say that every time he saw a picture of Osama bin Laden he was reminded of al Faran’s leader.
Now he lay studying the primitive eaves of the shelter, roughly hewn from red pine, sawn and hacked into lengths which it must have taken many men and animals to haul to this spot. He had had enough of the last four arduous days, walking and climbing endlessly, with nothing more to greet them at the end of another twelve hours than a smoky hut and a clump of rice. Back home, running for miles, trekking into the mountains or taking a bike ride through the woods, setting up an impromptu campsite, were all voluntary experiences. But a route march at gunpoint through these high mountains, up flanks and over icy ridges with vertiginous sheer drops on either side, was punishing.
The hut they were currently housed in, which they had reached at dusk the previous evening, was split by a wooden partition into two dank rooms, devoid of furniture, each of them barely six feet square, the walls and ceiling scorched black by wood smoke. Its miserable male occupants had spent the early evening guarding the rough corrugated-tin gate of the compound, before coming inside to squat on a patchwork of rugs thrown over the impacted earth, from where they watched the hostages with fascination. The women and children remained out of sight in the second room, boiling up tea on a wood fire, rinsing metal bowls and talking in soft whispers.
The wind breached the nicks in the rough stone-and-earth wall, fanning the embers in the firepit. Earlier, two women who could have been mother and daughter had been forced to make dinner for all of them, eking out a meal for everyone from their meagre rations: ash-flecked rice, lavash and some kind of vegetable that resembled spinach and that had got the locals very excited when the leader had produced it. Spotting a small bowl of home-made butter in one corner, the younger gunmen had fallen on it, dipping their bread into it, gobbling it all up then taking it in turns to run a forefinger around the bowl. John had felt sick as he ate, hiding pieces of bread in his socks and padded trekking jacket before pushing the rest away. Sitting by the fire, watching the militants through the haze, he had thought, ‘I have to get out of here.’
He studied the sleeping hostages. He and Don had bonded a little. Two Americans in extremis. But the British pair, Keith and Paul, were different to him in outlook, experience and nature, almost as foreign as the kidnappers. They believed, naïvely, in the generosity of others, and in the importance of acting collectively. No doubt they would try to form some kind of escape committee if they had the chance, whereas he had calculated that he would have to capitalise on whatever chances arose, because they would be infrequent. ‘The Indians will save us,’ they had said. John had shaken his head in disbelief. They had been abandoned to their fate the minute they had been kidnapped. ‘There would be no rescue. In my mind we were totally alone.’
John had always been the one who’d unflinchingly confronted unpopular thoughts, even at the cost of making friends. He knew that saying these things out loud would have made him sound mean-spirited. But all he wanted was to live. He needed to see his mother, his father, his daughters again. He believed in the power of his imagination. That was what would get him out of here.
By the faint light of the embers of the fire he could see his sleeping comrades�
�� faces, pinched with exhaustion. How much ground had they covered over the past seventy-eight hours? Twelve hours of walking and climbing every day, stopping only to pray and at dusk. His, Keith and Paul’s beards were beginning to show, which he was sure would please their captors, as it made them less obviously foreign. He felt bad about what he was starting to plan, and knew it would have an impact on the other hostages. ‘But I had no other option. I chose to live. And I knew if I didn’t do it now, I would die.’ Everything depended on the number of sentries outside, and how alert they were. John was banking on the fact that no one would be rising for another three hours, until the 4 a.m. prayers. His stomach knotted in spasms. He was not sure if it was fear, dysentery, altitude sickness or a parasite. Whatever it was, he would use it to his advantage.
He got up and silently wound his way, boots in one hand, between the sleeping bodies. Gingerly pushing the tarpaulin door-flap aside, he emerged into the cold night air of the mountains: wood smoke, pine resin and snow. A sentry who was sitting beside the entrance to the compound looked up. John acknowledged him, then grimaced and gripped his stomach, as he had done many times over the past days. The sentry nodded and went back to cleaning his weapon. John walked out of the compound, counting three more guards dotted about in the trees, all of them in various states of slumber. He knew there were more sleeping in the next hut. Gripping his stomach again, he groaned gently before stumbling into the woods and finding a place to squat. He shivered and watched, taking in the scene.
