On the Grand Trunk Road (18 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
In its conclusion, the board of inquiry reported that it was “unable to substantiate a technical reason” for the crash, which of course is different from saying that it had found no evidence at all of a technical cause. The board went on to conclude that in the absence of a technical explanation, the “only other possible cause of the accident” was a “criminal act or sabotage.” And the only one of these acts the board considered plausible was the theory of the exploding—but not too violently exploding—undetectable canisters of poisonous gas. I was told later that in the final discussions, the Americans were inclined to see the evidence as pointing toward an accident, while the Pakistanis saw it as pointing toward sabotage. The Pakistani view won out, but the American view was there in the report as well.
When I began to investigate the crash, the board of inquiry’s report was about nine months old and not much else discernible was going on. The FBI had finally received permission to investigate the case in Pakistan, but many in Pakistan and a few in Washington saw the FBI’s efforts as desultory, part of a broader American cover-up. Whatever one’s view of this specific charge, it did seem that, at the least, the American government wanted to do something near the minimum necessary to follow up on the crash. Their geopolitical equations in Pakistan were changing rapidly. Benazir Bhutto had become prime minister in late 1988. Democracy had been restored. The Soviets had pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev was moving ahead with his revolutionary reforms in Moscow. Nobody wanted to wander around the cold war graveyard, digging up corpses. Nobody in the American government wanted even to talk about Zia or the crash. This attitude just made the Pakistanis, and now me, more suspicious.
Early in 1990, I had dinner with some Pakistani acquaintances in the establishment, as the local elite calls itself. I said I wanted to conduct my own investigation, on behalf of the
Post.
I didn’t want to get involved with conspiracy theories, I just wanted to stick to the material evidence, especially the forensic evidence from the crash site, which the joint board of inquiry had implied was mishandled, and which might provide answers to unresolved questions. Since there were a lot of other stories in South Asia that the Post expected me to work on at the same time, I told my Pakistani acquaintances that I needed help to get started. I asked whether, through their connections in the Pakistan army, the intelligence agencies, and the national police service, they could obtain the names and addresses of all the Pakistani relatives of those who had died in the crash; the names and current postings of all the army officers on duty at and around Bahawalpur on August 17; and particularly the names of the doctors and technicians at the Bahawalpur army base hospital, where the remains of the victims had been initially collected. My idea was to review the forensic evidence and how it had been handled to see if anything of interest came out of it. Within a few weeks my fax machine in New Delhi began to spew out an extraordinary—and extraordinarily long—list of the names and addresses I had requested.
Post.
I didn’t want to get involved with conspiracy theories, I just wanted to stick to the material evidence, especially the forensic evidence from the crash site, which the joint board of inquiry had implied was mishandled, and which might provide answers to unresolved questions. Since there were a lot of other stories in South Asia that the Post expected me to work on at the same time, I told my Pakistani acquaintances that I needed help to get started. I asked whether, through their connections in the Pakistan army, the intelligence agencies, and the national police service, they could obtain the names and addresses of all the Pakistani relatives of those who had died in the crash; the names and current postings of all the army officers on duty at and around Bahawalpur on August 17; and particularly the names of the doctors and technicians at the Bahawalpur army base hospital, where the remains of the victims had been initially collected. My idea was to review the forensic evidence and how it had been handled to see if anything of interest came out of it. Within a few weeks my fax machine in New Delhi began to spew out an extraordinary—and extraordinarily long—list of the names and addresses I had requested.
I flew to Karachi to see Kamran Khan, the Post’s stringer in Pakistan and easily the country’s most accomplished investigative reporter, an occupation that can be exceedingly dangerous for a South Asian, as Kamran would later discover. Kamran is a relentlessly cheerful man who earnestly embraces the revolutionary eighteenth-century ideas about freedom of the press that twentieth-century Americans mainly take for granted, if they don’t hold them in contempt. He agreed to start poking around with his Pakistan military and law enforcement sources. I decided to start visiting the relatives of crash victims.
In Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, in between the usual scrambling to write news stories, I rumbled around in the backseat of a chauffeured Toyota with my lists of names and addresses, looking more ridiculous than usual in a pin-striped suit, carted out of mothballs, from a previous posting on Wall Street. I figured the suit would lend an air of authority to unscheduled visits with grieving relatives of generals and army officers, but probably it just made me look like some fish from abroad who didn’t know how hot it was in Pakistan. I saw perhaps two dozen relatives of victims. Aside from the pathos of grief, the interviews produced a few interesting bits.
One was that on the night of the crash, amid all the chaos sparked by the sudden and mysterious death of a dictator who had ruled the country for eleven years, the Pakistan army had made a clear and firm decision to get the remains of all the thirty-one dead aboard the C-130 away from the crash site, packed into coffins, and buried as quickly as possible. Relatives around the country, huddled in shock, received quick calls from the army high command asking where they wanted their relatives to be buried. At dawn on the second day, August 18, helicopters and transport planes began flying out of Bahawalpur, carrying coffins to cities and villages scattered around the country. In each case, the army dispatched soldiers and officers to surround the coffins until they were put into the ground. Later, some Pakistan government spokesmen suggested publicly that the hurried burials had been ordered in response to Islamic law that the dead should be buried within twenty-four hours. This seemed a specious rationale. The relatives I interviewed said that while, traditionally, Pakistanis buried their dead before the corpses began to rot, there certainly was no twenty-four-hour time limit if autopsies were required. Also, a family typically would wait until relatives and friends traveling from outlying areas could reach the funeral site. In fact, the army itself made such an exception in the case of Zia. It held the president’s coffin in Rawalpindi for a couple of days until dignitaries from abroad, including U.S. secretary of state George Shultz, reached Pakistan for the funeral.
It wasn’t clear to the relatives whether the army had bothered at all to identify particular remains and pack them separately before dispatching the thirty-one coffins around the country on August 18. The coffins were all nailed shut and none of the relatives were permitted by the escorting soldiers to open them; few of the relatives I spoke to had been inclined to try, having been told that the crash victims had been burned to ashes or horribly disfigured. Some speculated that the coffins had only rocks inside them. Others thought there might have been some remains. The father of Mashoud Hassan, the pilot of Pak One, said he was told nothing officially about the condition of his son’s corpse. “The coffin we received was sealed,” he told me. “When they took off the flag his name was given, and it [a notice on the coffin] said, ‘Not to Be Opened.’ I felt there were some remains inside, and I was sitting near the box and I could smell a very weak smell. It was very hot. That gave me the impression that some part of his body was there. An air force officer later told me that he came to know that at least half the upper half of his body was there, was tied with belts and that it was found. In what condition, I don’t know.”
The suggestion by some Pakistan government spokesmen that the cockpit crew’s bodies could not be autopsied was further contradicted about six months after the crash when Mashoud Hassan’s father received an anonymous mailing of four of his son’s identity cards. The father said Mashoud usually kept the cards in a zippered pocket in the pants leg of his flight suit. The paper cards had no burn marks on them. One was Mashoud’s national identity card, another his military pass to enter VIP enclosures, both of which he presumably would have carried on August 17. Other relatives said they received similar materials—cloth armbands with only slight burn marks, paper identity cards with no damage or slight burn marks, pouches, even a few official papers. Sometimes the materials were turned over officially by the army upon request of the relatives. Other times they arrived unexpectedly in the mail, with no return address on the envelope.
I talked to a few other Pakistani officials who had been present at Bahawalpur on the afternoon of the crash. With one I spent long hours because he was articulate, well placed, had spent years in the West, and spoke about what he saw strictly in terms of material evidence and not in reference to conspiracy theories. I asked him to tell me exactly what he saw. He told me that he reached the crash site within thirty minutes. Some civilian Pakistani officials were present “and a few army officers [who] had moved by helicopter” from Bahawalpur. “There was just ashes, no flames, a little smoke.... Some parts of the bodies were recovered. It was just a big lump—a bone, an arm or leg, a bone, a shin.... There were just a few things intact. A diary book, some shells, some shells from the tank trials that had been presented as gifts.... One assumed the military doctors had done autopsies. One couldn’t dream of them not doing it.” My informant conducted interviews with witnesses during the next week or two. He remembered particularly talking on the night of the crash to a police constable posted on the bridge above the field where the C-130 crashed. “He told me they [the army] took some things away. They took some things away on the helicopters before anyone got there. There were two helicopters. He [the constable] mentioned boxes. A box or something.” There was no reason to believe this meant anything in particular. But by now the story was beginning to pull me in.
A few weeks later, Kamran and I arranged to meet in Lahore and make the long drive to Bahawalpur through the gullied drylands of southern Punjab. We had been refused any appointments at the Bahawalpur army base, but I figured we might be able to bluff our way on. Meantime, we checked into Bahawalpur’s finest hotel, a one-star with concrete floors, green walls, naked light bulbs, and padlocked room doors. We went out to see a few local police officers, which didn’t yield much. Late in the afternoon, we stopped by the Catholic convent where the U.S. ambassador, Arnold Raphel, had offered condolences on the day he died. An American nun from New York told us about the murder of Sister Margaret Theresa: She was killed just before the C-130 crash, in an atmosphere of hot Islamic anger in Bahawalpur sparked by the Salman Rushdie affair. She had been walking back to the convent after dinner at a local Chinese restaurant when a man came out of the shadows, said a few angry words, grabbed her shoulder bag, and shot her in the head, according to a Pakistani woman who saw it. Sinister, but so far as anybody knew, irrelevant to our inquiry.
After nightfall we drove to the army base. Soldiers flagged us down at the gate. I rolled down the window in back, flashed various cards in my wallet, mainly credit cards, and spoke in rapid-fire English, as if I knew what I was doing. Kamran sat quietly, trying to look important and impatient. A soldier hesitated and then let us through.
We wound through the grounds, searching for the hospital. As always, I was impressed by the superior amenities the Pakistan army allocates to itself—the trimmed, spacious lawns, the large bungalows, the cinemas and athletic fields. Just goes to show there’s a lot you can do in South Asia if you have the money. Stopping periodically to ask directions of soldiers and officers in the streets, we found the hospital. My list of names included the colonel who had been in charge of the hospital on the night of the crash as well as several majors and captains—doctors—who worked below him. I went into the hospital lobby on my own and asked an officer at a reception desk for the colonel. He told me the colonel had been transferred out a year earlier. I pulled out my sheet of paper and tried to pretend that this news was a grave, grave disappointment. I asked about the next man on my list, Major Munir Ahmed. Yes, he was still on the Bahawalpur base, the receptionist was delighted to report.
Was he in the hospital?
No, in his bungalow.
Fine. Where’s the bungalow?
He provided the address. He never asked what I was doing on a restricted Pakistani army base flush on the Indian frontier. In fact, he sent along an army private to make sure that I could find the major’s address without difficulty.
I rang the major’s doorbell. He came out onto the darkened stoop, accepted my business card, didn’t look at it, and began to fidget. I said I needed to ask him a few questions about the night of the plane crash. He didn’t invite me in, but he didn’t shut the door, either. He said he was an anesthesiologist. He was off duty on the afternoon of August 17 but had been called to the hospital after the crash “in case there was a need to resuscitate bodies. Quickly it became apparent that there would be no survivors. We came and went for dinner and so forth. The question of autopsies would be handled by the pathologist.” That night, he said, the regular pathologist was on leave, so a major was summoned from nearby Multan. The major drove through the night and arrived around midnight. The hospital was equipped “only to do a gross examination, no microscopic work or chemical analysis.” Microscopic work would be conducted at the army’s main headquarters in Rawalpindi; chemical analysis generally was carried out at a laboratory in Lahore. Some skin samples were prepared for microscopic examination. Some samples were extracted for gross examination. But at the same time, orders were dispatched from the base commander to the hospital commandant to prepare coffins immediately. A special coffin-building unit arrived at the hospital in the night, commanded by a colonel, and began construction. The major said he went home in the early hours of the morning, and when he returned early the next day, what little preparatory work for autopsies had occurred was now finished, “and the bodies were being prepared for shipment in coffins.” He said he never learned why these decisions were made, whether the initial specimens were preserved at all, and if so, what became of them. “Everything was top secret,” he said.
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