by Adrian Levy
In the picture, Hans Christian was dressed as Hamsa. ‘Good night,’ he had written underneath the message. ‘Good night, my lovely boy,’ Marit said to herself.
Her son was a magpie, picking up snippets of knowledge everywhere he went. Hamsa was a key figure in ancient stories of love, separation and reunion. Was that her son’s message, she wondered, desperate to comprehend his intended meaning. Was this a sign to his family that he would struggle until he was back with them? Or was it meant to indicate that he would not stop struggling, regardless of the danger? One way was imbued with hope, the other was reckless. However Marit took it, he seemed not to care about the risks he was taking. But that was Hans Christian all over.
A second photo was covered with dense notes: ‘On little eyes which still can look but understand little of the complicated processes which regulate human relations, I am quiet …’ This showed Hans Christian’s frustration at not being able to reach out to his abductors, she thought. ‘Hopelessness and meaninglessness take over where love should have been blooming.’ Did this mean that, unable to convince them away from their prejudices, he was exhausted and heading for a confrontation? ‘I still believe in the world’s meaning and achievement. But I am understanding by living the opposite.’ He remained engaged, even as his energies were sapped and he was becoming drained by his time in captivity, Marit thought.
She read on nervously, often finding his writing obscure. ‘Like a storm of wild, sick horses, caught in a corral, they have been running in panic,’ he wrote. ‘The hooves smashing against bare granite, the white is in their eyes.’ Had they all fled from something? Had there been a firefight, with al Faran battling the Indian security forces, and the hostages trapped in the middle? Her mind cast back to the haunting photographs of Don Hutchings and Keith Mangan. Or was Hans Christian saying he had clashed with his guards? ‘They pull and draw in all directions, the wheels are lifted above the ground and make flashes together with the lightning. Thunder booms like machine guns.’ It sounded like a battle. Her eyes played over the next sentence: ‘I am tied up under the wagon. Stones and grass cover my body.’ She prayed that this was not literal, and that he was not lying in some wooded encampment, trussed like an animal.
‘I’m cold and calm even if rats are jumping up and hanging off my skin.’ His words were getting darker with every line, but Marit could not tear herself away. ‘Nearly all the horses are fallen and are drawn by the two left. One horse is falling over against the wagon. Everybody is dead. I am alive.’ Something terrible had happened. What was it? She needed to know. She read the next lines aloud: ‘Winter does not wait to start, summer does not wait to end, the mist does not come with advance warning, but people who give in are slaves in time and place.’ That must mean Kashmir’s changing seasons were beginning to impact on the kidnappers. ‘Only people make stars in the snow.’ Up in the high passes, winter was on its way, endangering the lives of those struggling to survive its bleakness. ‘Only people take their own lives.’ He was expecting a showdown.
Marit knew her son. He would never take his own life. But she was not so sure he would not sacrifice himself to save his fellow captives. Generous and reckless, he had always put others first. ‘I will refuse to eat and die,’ he wrote here. He had started a hunger strike in an attempt to force the kidnappers’ hands, she was sure of it. ‘Their not eating strike was short, we moved and now I am exhausted …’ The others had done the same, but had folded too soon, and they had been moved as a result. Or was it just him? Then, the first mention of something concrete: ‘0.24’ – it looked like a time, just past midnight, but there was no date. When he was young, she had often found Hans Christian writing under his duvet in the middle of the night, and she imagined him, cold and hungry, doing the same now.
The penultimate coded message was the worst. ‘My searching battery is flat. I, who can vibrate around the whole world, have little spirit left. There is little joy left over.’ It must have been a very bad day indeed. ‘Little humanity. But I need to fight and I need to escape. I’m not dead, even if I can kid myself that I am … I still want to be a human being …’ The force within him was still strong. ‘I will escape if I can. I will not eat.’ It was hard to go on, but she turned to the last letter. Thankfully, this one seemed more hopeful: ‘You are a light wind of gold dust, spreading down into the river of my life. You are the most beautiful, concrete earthly thing in my fantasies. Your body and your soul shine out from your being. I’m very awake now. I’m more awake than for a long time.’ A light wind of gold dust. Marit was heartened to see that her son had not yet lost what the family called ‘the glow in his soul’. But then she came to the last line: ‘I’m in mortal danger, surrendered to people without balance or God.’
Marit desperately wanted to talk with the other families about these letters. But Arne Walther, the Norwegian Ambassador, had asked her not to share the contents of the package with anyone. It was a protective measure, he had said. Marit told Anette that she felt this was dishonest. ‘Everyone was telling us to keep quiet and let the Indians get on with their job,’ Anette recalled. ‘The American Embassy said it. The FBI came to see us and said it. Arne said it. It didn’t seem right, and went against our instincts. But we were so inexperienced that we went along.’
Fingers of light poked through the curtains in Marit’s room at the Embassy. Hearing bulbuls twittering in the bougainvillea, she knew why her son loved India. When he was free again, she would take time to enjoy it with him. Today, 13 August, would be a better day, a good day, she told herself as she got up and set off on an early-morning stroll around the Embassy garden. Frank Elbe, the German Ambassador, had invited the hostages’ partners and family members over for Sunday lunch.
Deputy Superintendent Kifayat Haider was enjoying a calm Sunday. Finally the yatra was over, and he was down in Srinagar with his family. But he was finding it hard to unwind. When the message was relayed to him from Aishmuqam communications centre that officers were needed to attend a crime scene in his district, he was quietly glad of something to do. Women gathering firewood high up in the Shael Dar forest, north-east of Anantnag, had discovered a body. It was a mortuary trip, but he could do with stretching his legs. So, gathering three armed constables, he drove out in a white police Gypsy jeep. A guide who knew where the body lay would be waiting at Seer, a village on the banks of the Lidder River.
At Anantnag, the party took the Pahalgam road, crossed the iron bridge over the Lidder at Martand and followed a track along its right bank. As the Gypsy climbed beneath the shadows of deodars, the constables sitting on either side of Haider gripped their rifles. Occasionally the jeep scattered a few straggly children and stray dogs, but otherwise they seemed to be alone. Lighting a Classic with an ostentatious flourish, Haider was actually a little nervous. Ahead was Logripora, the final resting place of Zain Shah Sahib, the patron saint of the Lidder Valley. His shrine in an ancient tree trunk had once been a popular place of pilgrimage, but since the area had become dense with militants, hardly any worshippers came.
A few miles short of Aishmuqam, the jeep reached Seer, where a bent old man in a pheran and white skullcap was waiting beside the road. Motioning to a steep incline up through the dark pine forest behind him, he said the quickest way to where the body lay was on foot. Haider elected to go with him, while the constables took the long way round in the Gypsy, agreeing to meet them at the top, in Panz Mulla village. Early-morning mist shrouded the trees, and everything was still as the DSP and the old man climbed up the hillside without talking. Eventually, after more than an hour, they emerged at Panz Mulla, a settlement of dilapidated dhokas where 220 families lived in a state of near-constant siege, preyed on by the security forces that came up here to hammer militants hiding in the woods. Smoke rose from several chimneys, but there was no welcome party or cup of chai. The villagers were frightened, and these days they barricaded themselves inside when they knew trouble was coming.
They were not stopping here anyway. Th
e old man motioned Haider to keep going. ‘Vail Nagbal,’ he said, referring to another village two miles further on. The nearest police station was now twenty miles back. Haider felt for the reassuring grip of his pistol in its holster, and followed. But Vail Nagbal came and went, and still the old man didn’t stop. This was much further into no man’s land than Haider had intended to go, and he was becoming more worried. At last they reached a clearing in the forest, and then he saw it: something lying on the ground, surrounded by small bundles of firewood.
Haider took in the crime scene. He had been to so many of these since the militancy had flared up that he felt nothing at first, although some things stood out. The corpse was dressed in mismatched olive fatigues, with green sweat pants underneath baggy shalwar trousers, and its arms and legs had been trussed with rough twine. The head was missing. ‘It made the scene appear as some kind of nasty execution.’ From the large maroon stain on the ground beneath the body, death had been caused by decapitation at this very spot. Haider poked around, and found what he was looking for forty metres away: the head. He rolled it over, and gasped. Blond curls and a strawberry-blond beard matted with blood. The eyes, half-open, were the grey-blue of Tar Sar. It had to be a hostage, or possibly a Chechen fighter enlisted into the Kashmiri jihad. If it was a hostage, Haider knew that the political ramifications would be momentous. The militants had broken new ground here, he thought, capturing a foreign tourist and killing him so brutally.
Lighting up a Classic, DSP Haider turned to see his constables arriving in the Gypsy. They shouldered their weapons as Haider rolled the body over. Everyone gasped. ‘We all saw right away that the blood on the corpse’s neck was still oozing, which meant that the killing was recent,’ said Haider. Whoever had done this might still be nearby, watching. They had to act fast. They might be outgunned. Haider saw that a note was pinned to the victim’s shirt, and plucked it off: ‘We have killed the hostage because the government has failed to accept our demands. Indian dogs, if you do not fulfil our demands, in 48 hours the others will suffer the same fate.’ The DSP felt bewildered, incensed and distraught.
He ordered the twitchy constables to make a rapid search of the area while he looked over the butchered corpse for anything that would aid identification. Terrified, the two men ran around, safety catches off, while Haider poked at the cadaver. Although there were brown socks on both feet, there was only one black boot, trademarked ‘Micro’, on the left foot. The right foot poked out of its sock, and was dirty and blistered, as if the victim had walked a considerable distance without footwear.
Feeling inside the man’s torn green shalwar kameez, Haider found what felt like a square of paper forced into one of the seams. He wriggled it free, and saw that it was a page torn from an Indian magazine. On one side was a banal cigarette advertisement, some scantily clad Bollywood starlet running across a beach. On the other was an advertisement for ‘Arvind Cotton Classics’. Haider was perplexed. It had to contain an important or personal message, since the hostage had clearly gone to the trouble of concealing it. Scrutinising the page more closely, he spotted tiny, handwritten words marching antlike along its margins. On one side was a list of countries: ‘Turkey’, ‘Greece’, ‘UK’, ‘Bolivia’, ‘Brazil’. On the other was a list of local place names: ‘Magam’, ‘Pahalgam’, ‘Kapran’. On the reverse were the titles of dozens of songs by David Bowie, the Waterboys and Led Zeppelin. Nothing significant, Haider concluded as he shoved the page into his pocket.
The corpse was wearing a green T-shirt. Haider reached for the label: ‘Janus of Norway J’. The Norwegian hostage? It had to be. He lifted up the T-shirt, and recoiled. A message had been carved into the dead man’s chest in ten-inch-high letters in what looked like Arabic or Urdu script. He called his men, who helped him decipher it. No one was quite sure, but then he got it: A-L F-A-R-A-N.
One of the officers had found a long knife among the deodars. Haider suspected it was an army-issue bayonet of some kind. Covered in blood, it was probably the murder weapon. ‘The foreigner had been frog-marched here, before being forced down and sacrificed like a goat for Eid,’ he thought.
Haider knew they had to get out of here as soon as possible, with the body. As he and one of the constables slid it into the back of the Gypsy, the other constable came back with another trophy: a green rucksack. In it were a handful of colour photos, a small purse containing shipping receipts and credit cards, and a passport that confirmed the dead man’s identity: Hans Christian Ostrø. ‘I scooped up the head, wrapped it in a strip of cloth and put it on the seat next to me, where it remained, rolling this way and that, all the way back to Anantnag,’ DSP Haider recalled.
By the time they arrived at Anantnag, the town’s police station was besieged. Amid chaotic scenes, the body was hustled inside on a rusty stretcher. Someone took a photograph showing Ostrø’s head propped unceremoniously between his thighs as Haider screamed, ‘Get these parasites out of here!’ He ordered the stretcher to be taken to a private room. ‘Doctor!’ he shouted, calling for a police medic. While he waited, he again studied the torn page he had found in the man’s clothes. What was he missing here? As he scanned the song titles more carefully, his eyes lit on a phrase: ‘Good luck to you all. If I should die, I am wearing a message to my family in my balls.’ The hostage, he realised, had cleverly hidden a significant message amid otherwise random writings that he knew the kidnappers would not be able to understand. Instead of waiting for the police doctor, Haider began to manhandle the body. It was difficult, but eventually, feeling along the creases, he retrieved a roll of papers from the victim’s underpants.
Inside was a blizzard of words, but frustratingly they were in Norwegian. Just as he was wondering where he could find a translator, an Inspector poked his head through the door to say that a helicopter was on its way. BB Cantt had commandeered the corpse, on the Governor’s orders. Ostrø belonged to the army now. Once again, Haider was being sidelined. Growling, he pushed the papers into his pocket.
As they filed into the German Embassy dining room for lunch, Marit Hesby was alarmed to see that she was seated beside the Ambassador, Frank Elbe. What on earth would they talk about? This world was new to her. She was relieved to see Jane Schelly slip into the chair on Elbe’s other side. Before the Ambassador arrived the two women chatted for a few minutes, discussing the latest rumours. Someone had heard that the hostages had had their shoes taken away to prevent them from escaping. After Elbe arrived, the meal got under way.
Halfway through the main course, a succession of Embassy staff got up to leave. Hans Christian’s sister Anette noticed it straight away. ‘The German Ambassador disappeared. I thought, “Oh, it’s the press, they’ve found out we’re all here and they’re asking for interviews.”’ But one by one the diplomats filed back in, and said nothing, although their faces looked gloomy. ‘We had our dessert, cherries jubilee,’ recalled Marit, ‘but Ambassador Elbe didn’t touch his plate.’
The families were ushered into another room for coffee. ‘Our Ambassador, Arne Walther, was standing over in a corner with the British High Commissioner,’ said Anette. ‘I thought, “That’s strange, Arne wasn’t invited to the meal.” There was also a doctor who I recognised from the British High Commission. They called us all to attention. Then they told us that the body of a Caucasian male had been found, although not formally identified. We should all go back to our respective embassies and wait for news.’ The women shrank back in horror, and then the sobbing started.
Marit was stunned. ‘I remember looking at the other families and feeling sorry that one of them would soon be told their loved one was dead.’ Someone, nobody could recall exactly who, starting weeping and saying that she wanted to go home. Jane remembered the stunned atmosphere as everyone wondered who it was who would receive the terrible news: ‘You didn’t want it to be your loved one, and yet you looked around the room and thought with horror that you could not wish this on anyone.’ Jane felt she had to say something on behalf of
all the families. She asked if it were possible that the body might be that of someone else, since all the papers were reporting that Westerners were still trekking in the Pahalgam area. ‘Elbe looked at me as if he did not understand my English, and said absolutely nothing,’ Jane recalled.
As she walked out, Marit noticed the German Ambassador putting his arm around Jane, and a guilty wave of relief washed over her. ‘It must be Don,’ she thought. However, when Marit, Anette and Hans Gustav arrived back at their Embassy, the Ambassador called them into a private room. ‘There’s a rumour,’ he said quietly, ‘it’s Hans Christian.’ The family was stunned. Could it be a mistake, Hans Gustav asked desperately. Walther didn’t think so. The police in Kashmir were asking if Hans Christian had any distinguishing marks. Marit immediately thought of the scar running diagonally across the right side of her son’s back. When he was six years old and living in Tromsø, a neighbour’s dog had attacked him. ‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly. ‘All I had in my mind’s eye was a picture of my beautiful boy lying dead somewhere,’ she remembered. It was senseless and cruel. How could someone have killed her son, a boy with so much love in his heart? If it was Hans Christian, she needed to know how he had died. Ambassador Walther looked away with an expression that suggested this was something he had not prepared himself for. ‘We don’t know,’ he murmured.
Anette was mute. She idolised her big brother, who had taught her everything she knew about music and poetry, and could not imagine life without him. She made her excuses and went up to her room. For a moment she sat on the bed, trying to collect herself. Hans Christian had always been there for her: ‘He just couldn’t be dead.’ Still unable to cry, she called her boyfriend in Stockholm. He had already seen it on the news. ‘Eric told me to prepare myself for something terrible. The reports in Sweden were saying that Hans Christian had been beheaded. I just couldn’t get this. I couldn’t understand this. I was in complete shock. This kind of thing – in Norway, it was totally unknown to us.’
