by Adrian Levy
‘The other Briton [Keith]: Solid. Calm. Strong. Gives little away. Called “boulder” by villagers. He makes peace with everyone after a fight. Stops the arguments flaring.’
For now al Faran appeared to be staying put with its captives. The only thing that caused them to move temporarily was hunger, as a teashop owner from the nearby village of Brayan recalled telling the Squad: ‘They came here one day, looking for sugar. The prisoners looked depressed. We told them release the foreigners as this is bringing shame on all of us. We said the whole of Kashmir is against this. They said, “It will all be over soon.” We saw the foreigners. They wore local dress and plastic shoes.’ A villager from further down the valley reported how his neighbours had been harried by an Indian Rashtriya Rifles patrol passing through. Later, one of the al Faran commanders came down to find out what had been said, and seemed ‘very tense’.
The Squad had many observations to send back up the line: occasional Indian Army patrols were moving around Warwan, even though 15th Corps officials at BB Cantt categorically denied it. The kidnappers were rooted to a single location, yet the police were aware of no active plans to launch a rescue attempt. ‘We are doing what was asked of us. Now what will we do for the hostages?’
Sukhnoi was impregnable, came the reply from the security forces. They asked for yet more intelligence about the positioning of the guards on the hillsides and in the village. What time did the guards’ shifts start and end? How many remained outside at night, and how many slept in the room with the hostages? All of these were details that were difficult to ascertain. The hostages could easily be killed or wounded in the helter-skelter of a raid, the army warned in conversations the gist of which was noted down in the Crime Branch file.
Frustrated at not being allowed to move on Sukhnoi, Sadiq’s Squad switched tactics. If a raid was out of the question, then another way had to be found to penetrate the al Faran camp. Out in the countryside, the Squad continued recruiting and activating undercover sources. Among them, the file revealed, was a young constable from Ashajipora, a village south of Anantnag, identified by his initials, ‘MMS’. Only his aged father knew he had enlisted as a police constable some months back, and now, instead of putting him into uniform, the Squad sent him back out into the countryside to volunteer for the Movement. MMS had the right credentials, since his brother had been a militant and a shaheed, having been ‘martyred’ while fighting the Indian security forces, which gave the family status in the community. Within a few days, MMS reported back to Crime Branch that he had been accepted into a Movement cell operating from Achhabal, an old Mughal town five miles from Anantnag, on the road to Daksum, one of the group’s strongholds. The Squad was inching closer to Sikander and to Sukhnoi village.
Then there were the Movement fighters and supporters who were already in custody, most of them facing indefinite prison terms, torturous interrogations, or death in staged encounters upon release. The most vulnerable, with children or large extended families, were offered a deal by which they were released back into their communities to act as double agents. Some of them vanished the minute they were freed. Others did what was asked, in the knowledge that in Kashmir it was impossible to hide from the security forces for long. Prisoner release was a risky strategy, but the Squad argued for it. One of those who worked out for them was a hospital canteen manager referred to in the file by his initials, ‘MAT’. After his release from prison he almost immediately gained access to Sikander himself, having been accepted by Movement cadres in Pahalgam and its surrounds as bona fide. Equally precious were the police’s long-term undercover assets, unmarried officers who had given up everything for the job. Key among them was Agent ‘Rafiq’, a constable who had agreed to endure a six-year stretch in Srinagar’s Central Prison on a terrorist charge contrived to get him close to convicted militants. From there he had reported continually on their dealings with the brothers on the outside. When he was released he used his cell-block credentials to approach the Movement’s Anantnag operation, and by July’s end he was fighting alongside them.
Mushtaq Sadiq liked to handle some of these assets personally. The best of them included a militant commander and suspected ISI agent from Pakistan who had been captured in Warwan at the end of July. This man had expected to die during interrogation, but Sadiq spared him, offering him an amnesty and free passage out of Kashmir if he worked for him. Agent ‘A for Ahmed’ agreed, and after being released he told his comrades in the Warwan that he had eluded captivity by hiding in the upper reaches of the mountains. The story was accepted, and Agent A was welcomed back into the fold, stationed in and around Sukhnoi, from where he reported back on the mood and the plans of the kidnappers, and the health of the hostages, giving the Squad a foothold inside the village itself.
Contact with these resources had to be made through message drops or occasional phone calls to pre-agreed public booths. A Squad member would wait around Anantnag, or on the outskirts of an outlying village, in a wood store or a smithy, a copse or a riverbank, often for more than eight hours, until the agent felt safe enough briefly to give his comrades the slip.
There was little the Squad did not utilise. Just as Roy Ramm and co. had prised apart the Ostrø letters, the Squad analysed them too, the Crime Branch file revealing how some of them had reached Srinagar after a villager had risked his life recovering them in the Warwan and getting them to the police. The significant advantage the Squad had over Scotland Yard and the FBI was that they already knew the location of the captives, something kept from the Western detectives. So when they read these pages, written in the Warwan, they not only fleshed out the perspective of the imprisoned men, but also confirmed crucial information about their precise location.
‘To note, atmosphere in Warwan changing in favour of the hostages,’ read a report the Squad sent to senior officers. ‘Villagers are helping the hostages, an important consideration if there were to be an active operation.’ While they waited for a response, the Squad tried to find out more about Hans Christian Ostrø’s fate from their eyewitnesses in Sukhnoi. A tumble of images and insights came back.
The first conclusion reached by the Squad was striking: ‘Ostrø has formed an escape committee. A man with some military training, he has decided the captives have to get out at any cost.’ Beginning in late July, Ostrø had challenged, undermined, sniped at and harassed the kidnappers, taking the game to them despite entreaties from the other hostages to desist. A villager who still lives near Sukhnoi told the police, ‘He has made three hard escape attempts.’ On the first, he was said to have got out at dusk and raced up the mountainside behind the village, only to run into a returning al Faran patrol. ‘They led him back into the village at gunpoint, with the prisoner shouting, “I’ll go again and again, wherever you put me.”’
On the second attempt, Ostrø had jumped into the raging river. ‘But the freezing water paralysed him,’ said the villager. ‘We thought he was drowning.’ Ostrø had been fished out shaking. ‘He was dragged back to the hut and still he screams and shouts. We think he has stopped eating and is tied up inside the house.’ On the third attempt, at the beginning of August, Ostrø had knocked over two guards with a branch and pelted off down the undulating path towards Inshan, making it through two villages and over a precarious wooden bridge before militants on ponies outpaced him.
The Squad were now worried for Ostrø’s safety. They began picking up signs that the kidnap party was tiring of his unruly antics. A villager from Brayan who passed through Sukhnoi in the first week of August recalled telling police: ‘I saw a blond foreigner tied like a goat to the leg of a charpoy. He was calling out for water.’ In the writings that had found their way to the police, Ostrø had alluded to being trussed up.
In the second week of August, word came from a baker in Sukhnoi that Ostrø had been permanently separated from the others: ‘He is in a different house, tied to the charpoy night and day. Every night he and it are dragged inside. He doesn’t even come off it to go t
o the toilet. He screams and sings through the night.’
The relentless Ostrø still would not submit. Tied up outside during the daytime, he had spotted something. The villagers saw it too: ‘A helicopter. It returned most days. Militants joked among themselves that it was the Pakistanis, keeping an eye on things. We said, “No, look at the markings. Saffron and green. It’s Indian. An Indian helicopter.” Most days we heard its rotors whirr, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. It was over us all the time. We thought they were taking photos.’
One day, Ostrø chose his moment when the guards went to wash. ‘The hostage managed to break free, and jumped up, waving a scarf at the chopper. “I am here, look, look, we are here. Come and get us. Can’t you see, we’re prisoners.”’ The gunmen came running, knocked Ostrø out with a rifle butt and tied him down once more. Afterwards, fights broke out among the militants. ‘The chief was angry and frightened of the helicopter, and fuming with Ostrø.’ Some villagers protested, only to be beaten too: ‘We were told that our lives also would not be spared. In the morning, they took Ostrø away.’
An urgent report went up the line to Sadiq’s superiors, along these lines: ‘Army surveillance all over Sukhnoi from the air. Ostrø in danger. He has disappeared.’
SIXTEEN
The Game
The Indian helicopter crew must have seen Ostrø waving, the Squad concluded, as well as the Indian intelligence analysts who studied the photos they took. What about the agents from IB, who got to see all the data, along with their publicity-shy partners in RAW? Senior Kashmir police officers pressed the insular intelligence community for information, and the spooks begrudgingly produced a few ‘high-quality stills’, although they continued to withhold details about the intention of this intelligence-gathering operation or any clues as to its duration.
RAW’s leading agent in Kashmir was C.D. Sahay, a loquacious officer from Karnataka in India’s south-west who had become a spy in 1970 and would become RAW’s director in 2003. He selected the shots to be passed down to the police: ‘They were so detailed you could see the sweaty faces of the captives as they played volleyball or cricket on the riverbank. They were pin sharp, and it felt surreal, almost intrusive, to be staring at them.’ There were images of all aspects of Sukhnoi village, as well as countless overhead pictures of the hut in which the captives were held. ‘There were even shots of some of the al Faran outfit, racing around Sukhnoi and guarding the hostages,’ Sahay recalled.
The Squad wondered how widely these images had been distributed, thinking of the politicians and civil servants in New Delhi who fended off daily press questions about what India was doing to rescue the hostages by claiming the search had failed to pin down al Faran or its captives. Here was hard proof that the upper echelons of the Indian security establishment had known of the hostages’ whereabouts for many weeks, and were observing them regularly while telling the wider world (and the families) the opposite, and also failing to mount a rescue operation, even though al Faran looked like sitting ducks.
The intelligence services and the military were unused to being cross-examined by the police in Kashmir. Few answers trickled down, apart from a brief statement that ‘A raid is unworkable.’ Years later, RAW’s Sahay still insisted: ‘The Warwan was impenetrable. We just couldn’t move on Sukhnoi because of its geographic isolation, and the high ground that surrounded it. If we came in by air, we would have been heard long before we were seen and the hostages would have been killed. If we climbed over the mountains, their lookouts would have twigged us and the outcome would have been the same: a slaughter in Sukhnoi.’
Privately, the Squad dismissed this reasoning. One member recalled: ‘If it had been a matter of days, or even a fortnight, the argument that it was “all too dangerous and difficult” might have held water. But the hostages were there for many weeks. After all this time not to have advanced at all, and not to have thought of something and tried it out, suggests someone, somewhere did not want to move on Sukhnoi.’ The Squad began to think that the Indian security forces intended to keep the kidnappers and the hostages penned in this remote valley. But they could not fathom why. The Squad now regarded themselves as the hostages’ ‘last hope’, and while they tried to get to the bottom of the official foot-dragging, they redoubled their efforts to free the captives, seeking more information from among the Warwan’s terrified inhabitants. They needed to know what had happened to Ostrø, how the remaining hostages were coping after his disappearance, and most pressing of all, what the kidnappers intended to do with Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk.
Some witnesses, Sukhnoi residents or those from nearby villages, believed that the kidnappers’ commander, the Turk, was infuriated by the Norwegian’s last attempted break for freedom, having already become agitated by the near-continuous presence of the all-seeing eye of the Indian helicopter above Sukhnoi. The same story came back from Agent A, the Pakistani militant who had been put to work as a double agent. He claimed that the regular, distant whirr of rotor blades had gone on ‘for more than two months’, and had got the whole village on edge. After Ostrø broke free to signal to the helicopter, villagers had watched, horrified, as the Turk took hold of him, telling him in a language he could not speak, ‘Tum bhi bahut zahmat ho.’ You are too much trouble. Then the militant leader had appeared to become calm. ‘I’m setting this one free,’ he announced. He left with Hans Christian the next morning, 11 August, accompanied by two dards, nomadic hunters, and several clanking bags of provisions. After they were gone, a villager overheard the four remaining hostages being told by Qari Zarar, al Faran’s Kashmiri deputy commander, that their friend was being set free ‘as a goodwill gesture’ and because ‘he was too much of a handful to keep captive’.
The Squad pieced together Ostrø and the Turk’s movements, their sources supplying piecemeal accounts from the length of the dangerous Warwan, drawing out good intelligence from increasingly open villagers, convincing evidence that a rescue was possible – if there was the political will. For now, they mapped the Turk and his small procession as they made their way south, following the line of the Mariev Sudher River as it rushed through the valley. First they had passed through the village of Rikanwas, a forty-minute walk to the south, which remained bathed in warm sunlight for an hour after Sukhnoi fell into freezing shadows. Following narrow, stone-walled paths that wove across the steep ups and downs of the basin, they had then passed through topsy-turvy Gomry, reached by an ancient bridge held up by columns of wobbling boulders, and then down into a deep gully the churning river had cut into the valley floor, its water-smoothed stone banks rising like the bowed sides of an enormous tanker. Three hours into the walk they had climbed a path that passed the walled village of Afti, then up and down several more calf-straining inclines towards Basmina, a fortified stone-and-wood hamlet lying near the valley bottom.
They trekked beside the river for another hour before stopping briefly to take on water and bread in lonely Chordramun, where wooden guttering diverted rivulets throughout the village, giving each house running water. By this stage, twelve miles south of Sukhnoi, all was not well in the party, according to one shepherd who saw them. He had been astounded by the sight of a blond Westerner being pulled along the path by a ‘furious’ militant commander: ‘The angresi was shouting and resisting, while being hauled like a calf.’ A farmer was also shocked to see ‘a guest mujahideen fighter dragging along a foreigner, his wrists bound with twine’. After Chordramun, the group had left the river, and shepherds spotted them setting off to the west, scrambling up the steep scree-and-grass bank of the Warwan and into a dense forest, following a path that local nomads rarely used, before disappearing over the high ground and into the snow, heading in the direction of Vail Nagbal. There, the Squad knew, having read DSP Haider’s report, two days later, on 13 August, Hans Christian Ostrø was beheaded.
Villagers who still live in the Warwan recall that the Turk arrived back in Sukhnoi, alone, on 14 August, ‘sullen and irritable’. His comrade
s already knew what he had done. Qari Zarar, the al Faran deputy commander, was ‘screaming’. The discovery of Hans Christian Ostrø’s headless body was all over BBC World Service, he said, with reports highlighting how the killers had incised the name ‘al Faran’ across his chest. Was the Turk insane? Qari Zarar was overheard repeating a line from the radio over and again: ‘Global condemnation of the violent men behind such a brutal killing’. A blazing row flared up between him and the Turk, with residents taking shelter, afraid that one would kill the other and then slaughter any witnesses. ‘How can this help us achieve our aims, getting our leaders freed?’ Qari Zarar was heard to bellow. ‘It makes us look like dogs!’
No one could bring themselves to tell the remaining hostages the truth, villagers said later, with the kidnappers maintaining the charade that Ostrø had been released. But with the members of al Faran now deeply divided, their heads hung low, everyone in Sukhnoi suspected that Don, Keith, Paul and Dirk understood something terrible had happened to Hans Christian. While the hostages dealt with that knowledge in whatever way they were able, the Movement in Pakistan publicly distanced itself from the Turk, releasing a press statement condemning the killing and even ‘the militant group that had seized [Ostrø]’, to which it claimed ‘no allegiance’. Was al Faran now out on its own, the Squad wondered.
In Sukhnoi, the nervous kidnappers debated what to do. From the Movement’s heartland high in the wooded Anantnag hills, the Squad’s agents MAT (the former hospital canteen manager) and MMS (the young police constable) reported back to Crime Branch that in the days after Ostrø’s death, al Faran’s commanders mounted a damage-limitation exercise. Sikander had sent furious messages over the Line of Control to his contacts in Pakistan, complaining about the behaviour of his commander, ‘a man he had never trusted’. Now he sought advice on ‘managing’ the disaster. ‘We need to act. What should I do?’ Sikander asked in coded communications sent from his hideout, thought by the Squad to be a safe house just outside Anantnag. Indian signals intelligence intercepted some of the calls to and from Sikander, a barrage of rebukes and recriminations, and some advice. ‘Madarchod! [Motherfuckers] We’re losing this game all on our own, portraying ourselves like common darshit gar [terrorists],’ a known ISI ‘voice’ in Pakistan said. ‘Stay put. Do not travel to the Warwan. We don’t need another brother getting sucked into this mess.’
