by Adrian Levy
One thing immediately struck everyone who saw the photograph: a fifth man, standing next to Dirk, had been cropped off the print. On Bob Wells’s copy, a ruled biro line crudely revealed where the scissors had run, leaving behind the shoulder and upper arm of a short, stocky figure, wearing brown or maroon clothing.
The kidnappers had sometimes concealed their identities by scratching out their faces in photos dropped off at the Press Enclave, but this man had been cut off altogether. Ramm and co., who still knew almost nothing about the Squad’s inquiries, wondered if he was an Indian intelligence asset who had worked himself into the group and persuaded them to take this shot. ‘Allegedly, the photo had been altered to protect the identity of the photographer,’ advised the British High Commission in New Delhi, regurgitating what it had been told by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. Julie Mangan suggested that the man had been edited out because she might recognise him. But it was hard to draw any solid conclusions about why the image had been cropped. Jane Schelly wanted to believe that the picture was recent, but her State Department liaison warned her it could have been taken any time after September 1995, when the first snows fell in the Anantnag hills, which was where it seemed the image had been shot. In their headquarters at Quantico, Virginia, the FBI were studying the background, flora, light and shadows before offering any opinion. On 8 February Julie and Cath appealed via the Foreign Office for ‘direct proof’ their loved ones were still alive. No one was prepared to take the assurances of the Indian authorities at face value any longer.
Suddenly, a whole string of new sightings emerged, at such a dizzying pace that it seemed as if someone was answering them. The accounts of these ‘credible eyewitnesses’ suggested that all four hostages were wintering in what India described as Movement-friendly villages south-east of Anantnag. The sightings had been passed on with General Saklani’s personal annotations as either ‘accurate’ or ‘unconfirmed’, giving the impression that there was some kind of qualitative process going on behind the scenes. Some material came via the army, relayed from the office of Brigadier P.S. Bindhra, the head of 15th Corps, the most senior operational commander in the valley. Saklani was not able to say much about the rest, only whether it was a ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ account, first-hand or hearsay. All the time he warned of the need to protect undercover sources.
Seeing the weight of military brass attached to these statements, the seniority of the officials who backed them, and unaware of the contents of the police file, Roy Ramm and co. began adding coloured pins to the composite map in Church Lane once more. The hostages had been spotted in Hakura village on 29 December; at Kapran village on 2 January; twice in one day on 9 January, at Doru; then at Gool, in Achhabal, nine days later; and in Singhpora, in Kishtwar district, on 30 January. A pin for Liakbat village at the beginning of March. Another for Desue, where a farmer said he had turned the group away on 3 March. And one more for a sighting of all four captives, near Kokernag on 7 March. Most of these places lay in or close to the Sandran Valley, that ran south of Anantnag, the area Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian had visited back in November 1995, concluding that it had become a militant-free zone, completely under Indian domination. Back then her story had puzzled the FBI and Scotland Yard, making them question the veracity of India’s accounts, but now, starved of intelligence, they were eager for something positive to work on.
In the United States, nothing could dampen Jane’s growing feeling of optimism. A difficult Christmas was behind her, and for the first time in a while she felt upbeat about herself. Returning to her teaching job at Arlington Elementary had been a godsend: the children kept her distracted, and also meant she was engaged with life once again. From time to time she would sit down in the gym with her class to explain the latest developments in the hostage story. Her nights remained troubled, but she powered through, sitting in Don’s upstairs study, writing letters, calling India, sorting through newspaper cuttings and keeping her journal updated.
She had spent the winter months reading accounts of former hostages, and contacting some survivors, including David Mackie, who was now living and working in Los Angeles. Jane found his account of being held captive by the Movement reassuring. He told her that he and Kim Housego had been well looked after, staying for several days in a ‘wooden guesthouse’, before walking down a long, lush river valley and then staying at the home of an important Movement benefactor in Anantnag town. There they had been allowed to sleep in proper beds, take showers and watch television. Speaking to David felt like a turning point for Jane, and reassured her that hostage situations didn’t always end badly. She read how Hezbollah in Beirut had held John McCarthy, Brian Keenan and Terry Waite for many years before releasing them. In England, Cath and Julie contacted them too, and heard from them how important it had been to hear on the radio that their families had never given up.
Jane could feel herself healing, and Kashmir pulling her back. Although State Department officials phoned her several times a week, often during the half-hour before she headed off to school in the morning, she felt she needed to be closer to the action once more. The snows were receding in the Pir Panjal, and the first anniversary of Don’s abduction was approaching, as was her long summer break. But the plan she was starting to mull over could not be carried out without consulting Julie, Cath and Anne.
After surviving the double hell of Christmas and Keith’s thirty-fourth birthday on Boxing Day, going through the charade of opening cards and presents from his friends, then finding out that the ones she had sent to him in Kashmir had not been delivered, Julie Mangan had attended the wedding of Keith’s youngest brother David, who married his long-term girlfriend at St Barnabas, the same church where she and Keith had been married in 1985. For months the family had put back the date, hoping Keith would make it back in time to be best man. But finally they could hang on no longer, and on 30 December Julie had struggled through the service.
That spring she spent much of her time with Keith’s parents, usually going round for a cup of tea and a catch-up at the time the Foreign Office liaison officer made his daily update call. A large framed photograph dominated the living room these days, a shot taken by al Faran of the five hostages smiling and sitting on a rock in the Warwan Valley. It comforted Mavis, who could sometimes make herself believe that Keith and the others were off on a trekking adventure of their own choosing. She chatted away to Julie, conjuring up the imaginary everyday lives of the captives in the Kashmiri heights: ‘How are the boys sleeping? What are they eating?’ These family conversations made Julie feel closer to Keith. Charlie would chip in, commenting how he needed Keith back to help put new lights up in the porch or with some other household job. Julie understood her mother-in-law’s determination: ‘I had been his wife for ten years when he was taken, but a child is a special gift, and that must be the hardest part.’ Occasionally it felt as if Keith had only popped out for a pint, and Julie’s hopes that one day he might just walk out of the snow revived. ‘I love Keith and miss him so very much, and so do all our family,’ she said at a rare press conference. ‘We just keep hoping and praying that this nightmare will be over very soon. The longer it goes on, the harder it gets.’ The regular updates from Srinagar helped them all remain hopeful. ‘At least nothing has happened to any of them,’ she said.
Cath too was levelling out, although no one can ever fully recover from a crisis with no end. After leaving India she had returned to Nottingham, where she and Paul had first got together, and had his photographs from Kashmir exhibited in the lobby of the city’s Theatre Royal, along with those of other students on his course. It was a testament to the unfulfilled potential she saw in him. Afterwards, she packed up her Nottingham flat and returned to East Anglia, closer to where she had grown up, before accepting a place on a fine arts course at Colchester University. She went to Blackburn to visit Bob and Dianne Wells, who had just got through Paul’s twenty-fifth birthday on 13 February. She confided in them that she wasn’t moving
on, as Paul was always in her thoughts. ‘Whatever you need to do is fine with us,’ Bob told her. ‘She was still very young, and had her whole life ahead of her. We didn’t expect her to just sit at home and wait for Paul.’ But none of them had given up, Bob added: ‘We decided as a family we would go out to Kashmir as soon as there was something for us to do.’ In the meantime he and Dianne would keep their son’s memory alive, Bob framing some of Paul’s photographs from Kashmir, and Dianne getting involved in a petition to lobby John Major’s government for more action to help secure the hostages’ release.
In Germany, Dirk Hasert’s family were feeling embattled. His mother Christa was approached in January by two men who claimed to have the ability to rescue her son, and who asked her to sign a contract giving them the right to market their story once they had brought him home. Desperate, Christa had agreed. The two men had travelled to Kashmir, where they crashed around, sparking animosity and achieving nothing, then sold their story upon their return. From then on, Christa had refused to speak to anyone outside the immediate family. ‘We heard so many lies,’ recalled Berndt, Dirk’s elder brother, who remains cautious even today. ‘Always there was a new hope. A new rumour. But time was running, and my mother could never overcome the tragedy of Dirk’s disappearance.’
Meanwhile, in Kashmir, Sikander had surfaced at last. Several Crime Branch agents, including ‘Rafiq’ (the policeman who had served time in prison to ingratiate himself with the militants) and MAT (the hospital canteen worker who had dallied with the Movement), had got close to finding him, filing quality intelligence about his location. ‘Our business,’ a Squad member said, ‘was getting to Sikander first, so we could find out more about his contacts among Alpha’s renegades, to build a more detailed picture about Mati Gawran and to locate the graves.’
But Sikander always seemed to be a few hours ahead of the Squad. He had become especially paranoid after losing the Turk and the others at Dabran, their deaths announcing a clear end to the no-fire agreement he had struck with the treacherous Alpha in 1994. Then, on 17 February 1996, a call came over the police radio that Sikander had been run to ground. However, when the next message came through, it was not to alert detectives anxiously waiting to interrogate him. It was a death notice. The worst had happened. The elusive Sikander had been killed, apparently in an accident of his own making. An explosion had ripped through a house owned by a Movement supporter, close to Anantnag, and Sikander’s body had been among those pulled from the wreckage. The army released a statement saying that a bomb Sikander had been working on had detonated, killing them all.
The Crime Branch Squad were sceptical. With his engineering background, and many years’ experience as a bomb-maker, having learned his trade at Camp Yawar, where the ISI and Arab technicians had been his teachers, Sikander was unlikely to have done anything so stupid, although an accident could not be totally ruled out. What the Squad focused on was the story behind this death, which only they – and those above them – knew, one that made them view this news differently to their comrades who were punching the air, celebrating the elimination of a most wanted man. For the Squad, they had just lost one of the few witnesses to the Movement/renegade pact and everything it entailed.
Inside fortress Shelipora, Alpha’s heavily guarded domain, it was drinks all round. Bismillah, Alpha’s go-to man, recalled how everyone celebrated when they heard the news over the radio. They had played their part, and expected to be richly rewarded: ‘That morning our people had traced Sikander and several others from the Movement to a house outside Anantnag. A double agent, a man who was alongside Sikander but working for us, gave us the nod.’ This man had specific instructions: ‘He was told to lead Sikander to a secret arms dump.’ The Movement were looking to take revenge for the ambush that had killed the Turk, by setting off a string of bombs aimed at the army and Alpha’s network. ‘This cache was one of those originally gifted by the renegades to Sikander, the sweetener that had tipped him over to our side in 1994, showing him our intentions were supposedly honourable,’ said Bismillah. ‘But in fact the explosives and timers had originated with the army, that had pre-set the frequencies for detonation, waiting for the moment to strike.’ Once Sikander was inside the house, soldiers had remotely set off the explosives, killing everyone inside, including Alpha’s double agent.
In Dabran, the villagers had long expected to hear of the death of their most notorious resident, but everyone buckled all the same. The Bhat family claimed his remains. They could not risk burying him in the village graveyard, since the security forces still called by every week, breaking crockery, smashing pictures, stealing flour, oil and money, warning Sikander’s father that they would dig up the corpse if it was interred there, as they would not let his headstone become a place of pilgrimage. Instead they buried him behind their new yellow brick and concrete home overlooking the paddy. Once again Sikander became Javid Ahmed Bhat, the long-legged pace bowler. Not much remained of him, though: no photos, keepsakes, schoolbooks or reports. Almost everything had rotted after being buried for years in the mud of the back garden. The only thing his father managed to save was a copy of a First Information Report lodged against Javid when he was arrested during a student demonstration. Now he carried it in his pocket, fingering its creases to remind him that he had once had a son.
Sikander’s death made a few column inches in Indian newspapers, the story spun as evidence that the ailing Rao government was at last winning in Kashmir. But what made headlines everywhere was a press conference given on 10 March by the Kashmir police chief, Director General Mahendra Sabharwal, in Baramulla, a former militant stronghold in north Kashmir where pro-government renegades now ruled. Sabharwal told the Press Trust of India that the hostages were ‘alive and well’, creating headlines for the next morning’s papers, which were once again full of scorn for the Kashmiri militancy that had given birth to al Faran, giving the embattled Rao government in New Delhi a fillip. The resurgence of violence in Kashmir was portrayed as the result of a sustained assault by single-track Pakistan, rather than a matter of political incompetence or venality, charges that had long been levelled at the Rao administration: the previous August a commission had reported that a nexus of politicians and criminals was ‘virtually running a parallel government’ in the country.
Several weeks later, in April, the hostages issue rose again. This time, with the start of the elections only a week away, General Saklani contacted ‘the hostage wives’, as he called them, suggesting they publish a new appeal for information. Now was a good time, he urged, as an appeal would coincide with the start of spring in Kashmir. With the snow melting and the higher passes becoming accessible, the message would reach villagers up in the heights, and the authorities might discover important new clues. To those who knew nothing about the internal workings of the al Faran inquiry, the argument seemed plausible. The women agreed. ‘We are confident the sympathies of the Kashmiri people are with us,’ they wrote in a letter published in Kashmiri newspapers. Julie, Mavis and Charlie Mangan held a press conference in England. ‘We feel in ourselves, it is looking up,’ said Julie. Sticking to General Saklani’s script, she continued: ‘People will be going further into the mountains. People like the shepherds will see more and word will get around faster.’ The press was more interested in when she was going back to India. ‘If there was anything I could do I would be there straight away,’ she said.
Soon the sightings started again, each account triggering a media debate in India that boosted PM Narasimha Rao. In Srinagar, pins were stuck in the map (and stories written up) when the hostages were reportedly spotted at Hillar village south-east of Anantnag on 10 April, and for another sighting two days later. On 20 April the hostages were supposedly seen again at Andu, a village five miles north of Kokernag.
In Bahawalpur, Pakistan, the neighbours of Masood Azhar’s father, Master Alvi, recalled how he read these reports ‘fuming’. The retired schoolteacher and secret patron to a generation of jihadis was
‘filled with rage’, having been advised by his contacts in Pakistan intelligence that al Faran was finished, most of its members betrayed and killed after the hostages were handed over by Sikander’s men back in November and December 1995. ‘We set out in January 1996 to get Masood back,’ he told a close family friend, a religious teacher at the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi. But the Indians were now manipulating the crisis for their own ends, running what he described as a ‘ghost plot’, leading him to fear that it would be many more years before his son was freed from jail.
Without consulting any of his contacts in Pakistan’s intelligence service, according to a senior Pakistan government source, Master Alvi travelled to Islamabad and called a press conference, in which he played the doting father. ‘I know how the families of the hostages must be hurting,’ he said, seeming to fight back tears. ‘I feel the same for my son. I know their agony.’ Claiming that his boy was simply a journalist who had also gone missing in Kashmir, Alvi continued guilefully: ‘One hundred times I appeal to the al Faran to release the hostages.’
Jane, who was on her way to Washington with her brother-in-law Don Snyder, could not believe this performance. They had been invited to the White House to watch President Clinton sign a Bill committing the US government to a very modest $1 million extra funding to fight terrorism at home and abroad, an issue that while becoming pressing, was not yet an international priority. Jane was certain Master Alvi was lying. ‘The most difficult thing about this situation is just waiting and finding the one thing that will bring [Don] home,’ she told a waiting crowd of reporters when she arrived at the White House. Flanked by her brother-in-law and other guests, including relatives of those killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in December 1988, in the World Trade Center attack of February 1993, and in the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995, Jane continued: ‘I don’t set my heart for any particular day. I just feel comfortable enough that some day he’s going to be returned to us, and I hope it’s safe and soon.’
