by Adrian Levy
Studying material from the kidnappings of Kim Housego and David Mackie, the team read that Kim and his parents had been seized near the Meadow and taken to Aru on the pretence of checking their passports. The ransom demands were also similar to those in the present case. Kim’s recollections, written up for the FCO and Scotland Yard after his return to the UK, referred to himself and Mackie walking for three days before being forced at gunpoint to make a painful climb at high altitude, a route that eventually led down through a birch forest into a long glacial valley. Here, in a village at the foot of the pass, they were locked inside a wooden ‘guesthouse’ for several days while the kidnappers deliberated. Later they had been marched down through the valley towards another icy pass at its southern limit, only for the kidnap team to change their minds and march them back up again the following day. Eventually they had been taken back over the pass at the head of the valley before joining a rough, muddy track at Chandanwari, from where they were taken by taxi to Anantnag. It all seemed to fit what Ramm was seeing on the map.
Kim said he had overheard the name of the village in which they had been kept for most of their time as hostages: Sukhnoi (pronounced ‘Sook-nes’). Ramm’s team eventually found it at the head of the Warwan Valley, just south of the Sonasar Pass. Might the hut Kim and David were imprisoned in have been used again, one year on, to hold Don, Keith, Dirk, Hans Christian and Paul? Were they its wooden walls that provided the backdrop to the recently released photos? Ramm thought it possible.
FBI headquarters at Quantico in Virginia chipped in, closely examining all the kidnappers’ photos. It was just possible that the flowers visible in one picture of the hostages sitting on a rock might grow only in a certain place. Gujjar dhokas also varied subtly from valley to valley, and the lichen, mosses and grasses that roofed them could help to determine elevation and orientation, their exposure to the sun and growth patterns helping create a compass grid for the images. Then there were the missing personal items. The detectives began drawing up a list: Don’s yellow-and-black Casio altimeter, Nikon SLR and Tamron lenses; John Childs’ Canon, with his social security number etched on its base; Paul’s Nikon camera inherited from his grandfather; Julie and Keith’s stolen travellers’ cheques; and Hans Christian’s missing Norwegian Army-issue boot. Five passports. The FBI also called on John at home in Simsbury. ‘They would come with photographs of dead militants, who all looked like they’d been in a freezer for some considerable time,’ John said. ‘They looked like strangers to me.’
Al Faran had killed once. Would it do so again? Roy Ramm wished he had been running the show from the start. An experienced negotiator would have sensed that tensions in the rebel camp had been building to dangerous levels before the killing of Ostrø, and measures could have been taken to ease the pressure. This was the kind of delicate operation Ramm specialised in. It relied on psychological profiling, human instinct, technical intelligence and everyone working to the same purpose.
Once, he tried to talk to General Saklani about profiling, explaining how negotiation teams spent as much time seeking out information on those behind a kidnapping as talking to them. But the war-weary general changed the subject. Like all who served in Kashmir, after a number of years at the front line it had ceased to matter to him where the men he saw as terrorists came from, whether it was Bahawalpur, Mirpur, Kotli or Khost. It mattered even less if they were motivated by religious belief or politics. To Saklani and his colleagues, they were simply a mass of faceless and illiterate jihadis, clinging to a false ideology. All of which was unsatisfactory for the foreign teams, who began assembling their own files instead.
Comparing the demands made in 1994 and 1995, they zeroed in on the man at the centre of both: Masood Azhar. The FBI and Scotland Yard made representations to visit Masood in Tihar jail, but as they expected they were refused. Instead they raided Western intelligence archives to discover deep linkages, reports, nuggets and speculation that had remained dormant, but that when put together portrayed a very different Masood to the blethering fundamentalist pigeon his Indian captors represented him as. A copy of his confession from 1994, obtained by the FBI from a friendly Indian intelligence source, showed that he had readily admitted to travelling to Kenya, Somalia and Sudan in 1991 and 1993, describing how he had been dispatched by Maulana Khalil, his mentor from the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, to corral veterans of the Afghan war who had been deported by Pakistan after the conflict ended.
‘In Sudan, Masood had met Osama bin Laden and his nascent al Qaeda group, founded in 1988 in Afghanistan,’ read one report Ramm saw. The FBI requested more information on both bin Laden and al Qaeda, which in 1995 were perceived as minor players. Reports gathered by British foreign intelligence and its allies’ agencies suggested that bin Laden had armed, funded and transported fighters idling in Africa to a new front opened up by the Islamic Union of Somalia that was facing down US forces sent to bolster a failing international peacekeeping mission, with Masood Azhar providing the rhetoric in the field. Through bin Laden, this report suggested, Masood had come into the orbit of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed, who in 1993 had had a central role in the ground-shaking events that would later be depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down. Working with bin Laden again, Masood had travelled to Yemen to redirect yet more militants to the Somali jihad, meeting mujahid leader Tariq Nasr Fadhli, also an Afghanistan veteran, who was suspected of being behind two hotel bombings in Yemen in December 1992 that had targeted US Marines headed for Somalia.
Kenya, Sudan and Yemen. A trap laid for US forces in Somalia. Osama bin Laden’s cash and Masood’s invective. Ramm and the FBI were building up an alarming portrait of the man al Faran demanded be freed. French, German and British intelligence had further snippets, as did the Saudis. They warned that Masood’s influence extended deep into Europe. During the early nineties he had travelled extensively across Britain, where he was hosted by a maulvi in east London. Raising funds and recruits, his oratorical reputation preceding him and packing out mosques up and down the country, Masood had targeted working-class Pakistani expatriates, who maintained strong links with their old homes and had transformed places like Mirpur, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, into boom towns.
In Birmingham, Masood befriended Abdul Rauf, formerly a judge in the sharia court at Mirpur, who in those days made his money as a baker in Bordesley Green. According to British intelligence, Rauf was a keen fund-raiser, having helped set up Crescent Relief, a charity that sent donations to Pakistan. Rauf introduced him to ‘his rootless teenage son, Rashid, whom he said was in need of a mentor’. It would be some years before that relationship would lead to the wayward Rashid Rauf enlisting with Masood in Pakistan, hooking up with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda too. There were others Masood recruited as well. A file note sent to Ramm mentioned Omar Sheikh, the LSE student who was used by the Movement as the bait in the kidnapping of Paul Rideout and three other Western tourists in New Delhi in October 1994.
Studying Masood’s finances, other connections emerged. Not only had Osama bin Laden funded some of his operations, the US intelligence community found compelling evidence that in Pakistan the ISI had been underwriting his organisation, making monthly payments of up to $60,000 to the Movement. In two classified memos circulated to the American embassies in Islamabad and New Delhi, the CIA highlighted how the Movement was also ‘discussing financing with sponsors of international terrorism’. The bankers were thought to include the then Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Masood’s outfit had ‘new support groups founded across Europe, and headquartered in the UK’. These groups’ strategy was also changing, according to the CIA memo, with Western civilians now a target and self-contained terror groups being ditched for a much more fluid and united movement of like-minded jihadis.
There was compelling evidence that this transformation had already started. The CIA learned that the Movement had moved its training camps out of Pakistan-administered Kashmir to Khost, re-establishing them alongside camps operat
ed by Osama bin Laden and protected by the rampant Taliban, Afghan student medievalists wreathed in black who by 1995 controlled nine of Afghanistan’s thirty provinces. They had begun to besiege Kabul too, and were emerging as likely rulers of the entire fractured country. ‘Masood Azhar was a dangerous emerging force,’ an FBI report concluded. Was this, Ramm wondered, why the Indians would not countenance freeing him? Or did they know none of it? There were no answers forthcoming from New Delhi, but what Ramm had discovered was a frightening portal into the future, that reflected grimly on the present crisis too.
An alarming picture of the Movement and its General Secretary Masood Azhar was emerging. But what of the hostages and their captors from the mysterious al Faran, about which no intelligence could be found? The foreign detectives began to examine the letters secretly written by Hans Christian Ostrø, both the ones found on his body and the many others that had made their way by various means into the hands of the police. Working on copies supplied by the Norwegian Embassy, they started with the Arvind Cotton Classics advertisement that DSP Kifayat Haider had found hidden inside the dead man’s shirt, the one that he had used to reveal he had stashed a message to his family ‘in my balls’. A few lines higher up on the page, unnoticed by the Kashmiri police, was another short message written in minuscule lettering. Dated ‘August 6’, it was entitled ‘Escape Part 2’.
It began with a time. ‘0.30. I talked with Dirk and shared some thoughts and questions with him. We have been thinking about the same things: about the women and how to get away. If we have not escaped, I think we will do it in the middle of this month if nothing happens. Inshallah, if God wills … Light up the flame, sing and be joyful.’
So they had been plotting an escape. Ramm’s men postulated that they were trying to win over the village women who cooked for them. Maybe it was for this reason that Ostrø had been murdered, Ramm suggested.
Some other notes were dated too. On ‘Dag 24’ (which for Ostrø would have been 1 August) he referred to trouble brewing inside the kidnappers’ camp: ‘Here has been a fight and that was good. Now one needs to go carefully because it is a minefield.’ Tensions were high, and the kidnap team seemed to be in danger of splitting. ‘People are locked in. Other fellows are locked in too. They are left over to other people without weapons and they could not defend themselves.’ Ostrø appeared to be referring either to sympathetic villagers being locked up with them, or to Movement men who had been won over by the hostages.
On another page was a similar reference to fighting: ‘Holy fight, the battle’s just begun. We’re melting silver bullets. To be on the run. The dogs are hungry with their tongues outside. Still we try to have fun and be a preacher in the night.’ Ostrø was trying to mess with the heads of these men whom he thought of as slavish animals. But then Ramm’s team came across a more literal entry: ‘I have changed a bit since I wrote the first note and I hope your chances are good.’ Ostrø could only be addressing the other hostages, they concluded, which meant he had been separated from the others, although he was still close enough to them to believe he could get this note to them, maybe carried by the women, or by one of the Movement’s tame fighters who had been won over. But what had he done to be singled out? ‘I can’t personally put my faith in these people. I believe it will be harder for the big Kommando [sic] to put a death order on you with me alive.’
One week before Ostrø was killed, he had done something so momentous that he believed al Faran’s leader, whoever that was, was considering having him killed. The FBI and Scotland Yard were convinced he had made an unsuccessful break for freedom, and that he was telling the others it was up to them to flee on their own. ‘You might get home before me,’ he continued. ‘I am doing it now because I still have some strength left. I am slowly vanishing and I am of that kind which you can’t really see if I am sick.’ He was on hunger strike, perhaps intending to become a sacrifice, or to distract attention from the others. ‘Good luck to you all,’ he had signed off. ‘God bless you in the fight!’
More fragments of what he had been going through lay in the pages of a little green prayer booklet, The Hidden Words of the Baha’ullah, that investigators established he had bought during a visit to the Bahá’í temple in New Delhi on his way to Kashmir. ‘So what has the world to give today?’ he had scribbled in the margin. ‘A wet blanket, a cold, news in Urdu, good warm tea, bread without health, light from God, rain and blue heaven …’ He went on to identify one of the kidnappers, ‘Schub, a fighter, but he is only good and kind’ – possibly a reference to someone with the Pakistani name Shoaib, the FBI noted.
Here also were poignant reflections on his old life: ‘To all the girls I have known, how big a part I am in you, I don’t know. But I do know that one kiss from you can put me out of balance, can send me high up in heaven out of control.’ But these moments of elation were fleeting, and by the next message his mood had darkened: ‘I’m hiding myself. It’s turning to evening. There are so many lonely others who will fight God. They are all seeing. Don’t stand alone.’ Was he feeling the weight of his isolation from the others? Some phrases were filled with a palpable sense of the strain he was under: ‘I write this with my hands tied.’ Some contained considerable foresight: ‘Why such very bad people behind a prophet? The Muslim brotherhood represents pain, fear and hatefulness. Are you going to begin the next world war? Islam against developed countries. Are we going to suffer because of their ignorance? How does one meet hatred and isolation? Don’t we have the same right to breathe and do things like they have?’
Throughout, his growing pessimism was palpable. ‘To my family,’ he wrote. ‘If I should die now … I don’t die poor … You have been the essence that I have built my life on. A big train of gratitude and happiness is going through Asia to Norway to come and live in the house you have built in your dreams. Think of me. Think of castles, drakes, women with long hair. Think of little puppies, old skinny books, the innocent, growing seeds, rainbows, stars, the sun – and grow?’ In a dark corner he had conjured the things that made him happy.
‘To my family,’ he wrote again. ‘If I should die now, there will come bubbles of the tenderest love to those who are going to keep going with this life on earth which I have loved. The warmest hugs … I’m not afraid to die. You should know I’m well. I have had it better, but I’m not in any pain. Inside me there is lots of light. If I should die now, I have to tell you there are lots of things unfinished. My unborn children have missed an exciting childhood and my ocean of love. My family will never see me again. My best friends will put a ring of flowers on the top of a tower. If I should die now, I will not be satisfied. Much time will be wasted. Much suffering for me and mine without meaning … Open up lord, open up my eyes because I see my limitations and I am very silent.’
Then came the last set of notes. ‘Now I’m tired. It will be evening. The voice has been reduced and the listeners have become dust.’ He had no audience left, just his own imagination. ‘The butt has been broken, which dream shall now be dreamed?’ All he could hear were the angry voices of his captors. ‘Repetition and noisy men repeat themselves and are very boring, monotonous.’ They were arguing about how to deal with him. ‘One destructive hope, to escape home.’ But he feared that due to his hunger strike he no longer had the strength to run. ‘The well is empty and the stomach is cavernous. I am tired and stop for the night. The sky is still blue but only very little from outside comes into this cell.’
At the very end, he had run out of paper. He wrote the last message on a strip of bark, probably ripped from one of the silver birches that rose behind Sukhnoi village. It was the hardest to read. ‘I’m standing on a swing and grey skies become red,’ he began. ‘Suddenly it was over without warning. Broken knuckles, every organ breathing for air over the ocean waves. Then, it was over. There was no screaming, no hysteria, women yelling or children crying. Only the silence of old men’s stagnation and their peace and their quietness, their stillness of knowledge. Far away t
he golden castle supported by four elephants, Shiva’s temple. Around, shifting horizons. Then, it was over. The river’s cosmic fleeting was ended. Old men’s dry tears over material loss. Hissing snakes and self-pity. So it was over, a person with black eyes, Allah and My Lord. A pistol. I was not afraid. The End.’
The post mortem found broken skin on the knuckles of both of Hans Christian’s hands. His lungs had inhaled a mist of blood after the knife’s first, blunt cut. But there was no pistol. In the end they had used his own army knife.
Saklani had barred Commander Ramm from going outside the compound in the daytime, and there had been nothing from the kidnappers since the last deadline had expired on 15 August to prove that the remaining hostages were still alive. Ramm’s nights were spent watching bootleg videos with American military advisors and contemplating a small photograph he had tucked in his wallet soon after arriving in Srinagar, a picture of the hostages that he kept close to an important letter from his son. ‘I carried the photograph as a kind of reminder that amid the stifling bureaucracy of the G4 and the complications of negotiating, there were lives at risk,’ he said. But as the days dragged by, Ramm began to doubt that he would be able to exert any influence on this crisis, especially after al Faran issued another warning on 18 August that if the army or anyone else launched a raid, ‘we will kill the hostages immediately’. This turned the Indian authorities even further inwards.
Then a small movement in the tectonic plates of state occurred. Inexplicably, Ramm was offered a phone call to Rajinder Tikoo, the Indian police negotiator he had not met, and whose transcripts of his conversations with the al Faran contact he had never seen. The conversation was brief and uninformative, but jovial. The Inspector General of Crime Branch made it clear he was delighted to talk to Ramm, and admitted that he was struggling in his task. He even asked Ramm for his help, hoping the ‘huge and sophisticated’ intelligence machine back in London could be made to work for him. He also asked Ramm ‘if “from our perches high in the sky” we could see movement in a certain area’, suggesting that whatever technical intelligence the Indian Army had, it was not sharing it with the Kashmir police. Ramm said he would find out.
