Authors: Adrian Levy
The Meadow (2 page)
WESTERN DIPLOMATS AND INVESTIGATORS
Philip Barton – First Secretary at the British High Commission, New Delhi
Tim Buchs – Second Secretary at the US Embassy, New Delhi
Frank Elbe – German Ambassador to India
Sir Nicholas Fenn – British High Commissioner to India
Tore Hattrem – Political Officer at the Norwegian Embassy, New Delhi
Gary Noesner – lead hostage negotiator of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit
Commander Roy Ramm – hostage negotiator, head of Scotland Yard’s specialist operations
Arne Walther – Norwegian Ambassador to India
Frank Wisner – US Ambassador to India
J&K POLICE AND OFFICIALS
IG Paramdeep Singh Gill – police chief who instigates his own al Faran inquiry
DSP Kifayat Haider – police officer with operational responsibility for Pahalgam
SP Farooq Khan – the first STF chief
General K.V. Krishna Rao – former chief of the Indian Army and Governor of Kashmir
DG Mahendra Sabharwal – Kashmir police chief
SP Mushtaq Sadiq – officer leading the al Faran Squad
Lt. General (rtd) D.D. Saklani – Security Advisor to the Governor of Kashmir
IG Rajinder Tikoo – Crime Branch chief, who leads the negotiations with al Faran
SSP Bashir Ahmed Yatoo – senior Kashmiri police officer seconded to Kashmir State Human Rights Commission to investigate unmarked graves in 2011
THE KASHMIRI PRESS PACK
Mushtaq Ali – photographer for AFP. Rescued Kim Housego and David Mackie in 1994, and worked closely with Yusuf Jameel in 1995
Yusuf Jameel – the BBC’s Srinagar correspondent, instrumental in digging up the story behind the 1995 kidnapping
THE JIHADIS
‘The Afghani’ (Sajjad Shahid Khan) – the Movement’s military commander, a veteran Pashtun fighter from the Afghan–Pakistan border
Master Allah Baksh Sabir Alvi – retired schoolteacher and father of Masood Azhar
Masood Azhar – the jailed General Secretary of Harkat ul-Ansar (the Movement for the Victorious), from Bahawalpur, in the
Pakistan Punjab, who later became the head of Jaish-e-Mohammed (the Army of Mohammed)
‘Brigadier Badam’ – pseudonym for a senior ISI officer who was instrumental in establishing the ISI’s proxy war in Indian Kashmir
Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil – Masood Azhar’s mentor in Karachi. The spiritual leader of the Movement
Nasrullah Mansoor Langrial – famed
jihadi
commander from Langrial, Pakistan, chosen as deputy to the Afghani and known in
jihadi
circles as ‘Darwesh’
Omar Sheikh – former student at the London School of Economics, who became a kidnapper for the Movement in 1994. Also involved in the 2002 abduction of American journalist Daniel Pearl
‘Sikander’ (Javid Ahmed Bhat) – southern commander of the Movement, from Dabran village, in Anantnag, Kashmir
Naseer Mohammed Sodozey – a senior fighter in the Movement, captured in April 1996 and forced under torture to incriminate himself in the 1995 kidnappings
‘The Turk’ (Abdul Hamid al-Turki) – field commander of al Faran, a veteran
mujahideen
fighter of Turkish ancestry
Qari Zarar – Kashmiri deputy commander of al Faran, from Doda, in Jammu
THE PRO-GOVERNMENT RENEGADES
‘Alpha’ or ‘Azad Nabi’ (Ghulam Nabi Mir) – renegade commander based in Shelipora, above Anantnag
‘Bismillah’ – Alpha’s deputy, based in Shelipora
‘The Clerk’ (Abdul Rashid) – Alpha’s district commander, based in Vailoo, above Anantnag
‘The Tiger’ (Basir Ahmad Wagay) – Alpha’s field commander, based in Lovloo, above Anantnag
AFP – Agence France-Press
BJP – the Bharatiya Janata Party, a conservative Hindu nationalist political party
BSF – Border Security Force, a paramilitary outfit raised by India after its war with Pakistan in 1965 and later employed in Kashmir on counter-insurgency operations
CRPF – Central Reserve Police Force, the paramilitary police inducted into Kashmir to fight the insurgency
DG – Director General of Police. The force’s chief
DIG – Deputy Inspector General of Police
DSP – Deputy Superintendent of Police
HM (Hizbul Mujahideen: ‘the Party of the Holy Warriors’) – a Kashmiri militant outfit, formed in 1989, heavily backed at first by Pakistan
HuA (Harkat ul-Ansar: ‘the Movement for the Victorious’) – a group formed in Pakistan in 1993 by the combination of three
jihad
fronts, including Harkat ul Mujahideen, to rally insurgents fighting India in Kashmir. Designated as a terrorist organisation by the US in 1997
HuM (Harkat ul-Mujahideen: ‘the Order of Holy Warriors’) – formed in Pakistan in the mid-1980s by Maulana Khalil to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The precursor of Harkat ul-Ansar
IB – Intelligence Bureau, Indian domestic intelligence
IG – Inspector General of Police
IPS – Indian Police Service
ISI – Inter Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency
J&K – Jammu and Kashmir
JKLF – Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, formed in Birmingham, UK, in 1977; one of the first militant outfits to mount an armed struggle against India in Kashmir
JKSLF, or SLF – Jammu and Kashmir Students Liberation Front, also known as the Students Liberation Front. Formed in Kashmir in 1987
LoC – Line of Control, the 406-mile-long ‘ceasefire line’ that separates the Indian and Pakistan sections of the divided state of Jammu and Kashmir
POK – Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, as the Indians sometimes refer to the section of the state administered by Islamabad
RAW – Research and Analysis Wing, Indian foreign intelligence
RR – Rashtriya Rifles, an Indian Army force of specialist counter-insurgency troops, formed in 1990 to fight the insurgency in Kashmir
RSS – Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu paramilitary movement founded in 1925 to oppose British colonialism
SHRC – State Human Rights Commission, an Indian government body that investigates allegations of human rights abuses
SP – Superintendent of Police
SSP – Senior Superintendent of Police
STF/SOG – police Special Task Force, later renamed the Special Operations Group, founded in 1993 to fight the insurgency in Kashmir
On 1 May 2011, a Prowler electronic-warfare aircraft, taking off from the USS
Carl Vinson
, jammed Pakistan’s radar systems, silence spreading like emulsion over the Islamic republic. At fifty-six minutes past midnight on the morning of 2 May, two American stealth Hawks, ferrying a team of US Navy Seals, hovered over a walled compound in the spick-and-span garrison town of Abbottabad, seventy-two miles north of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.
Over the next few minutes, Operation Neptune Spear came to a head, achieving, with only a dozen shots fired, what John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor would call the ‘defining moment’ in the war against terrorism.
Winkled out of his hiding place by cruising satellites capable of measuring the length of a man’s shadow from six hundred miles up, while down on the ground a medical-aid camp established to counter polio in Abbottabad had been subverted to sniff out residents’ DNA, the elusive Osama bin Laden had finally been tracked down, a decade after 9/11. As he reached across his bed for his AK-47 he was shot dead, ‘decapitating the head of the snake that is al Qaeda’, according to Brennan.
One chapter in a story of our times had come to an end.
Sixteen years earlier, in the heights of the Indian Himalayas, where the mountains gather in a half-hitch to encompass the troubled valley of Kashmir, a crime was committed whose nature and cruelty presaged the age of terror Osama would go on to marshal.
In July 1995, high in the mountains of Kashmir, six Western trekkers – two Britons, two Americans, a German and a Norwegian – were seized by a group of Islamic guerrillas who demanded the release of twenty-one named militants imprisoned in Indian jails in exchange for their lives. At the head of the list was Masood Azhar, a portly cleric from Pakistan.
Masood Azhar’s early career mirrored that of Osama. Growing up in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province in the seventies and eighties, Masood, the spoiled favourite son of a wealthy landowner, had lacked for nothing – much like the privileged young Osama, whose well-connected family made its fortune constructing palaces for Saudi royals. Educated in an Islamist hothouse in the frenetic port city of Karachi, in Pakistan’s deep south, Masood graduated to become the mouthpiece for a guerrilla outfit that would, like Osama, gravitate to Afghanistan to fight the occupying Soviet Red Army to a standstill.
When Moscow retreated from Kabul in 1989, Masood and his unemployed fighters had converged on northern Africa, looking for new causes. They found Osama there too, well before ‘the Sheikh’ had been flagged up on Western watchlists. Together, Masood, a stubby firebrand, whose hypnotic patter had already propelled thousands into battle, and Osama, the lean and pensive fugitive whose deep war chest had bought matériel and men, began to direct Afghanistan veterans in a new fight against the West.
They struck first in broken Somalia in 1993, where America was bogged down in a peacekeeping mission, Masood and Osama arming Islamists with rocket-propelled grenades that brought down two US Black Hawks in the battle for Mogadishu, leaving nineteen American soldiers dead and seventy-three wounded in a bloody débâcle. Masood was soon travelling again, this time to Britain, where he raised more funds and recruited
jihadi
sleepers who would wait the best part of a decade before attaining notoriety in both the West and the East.
However, in 1994, while Osama was consolidating his front in Sudan and Yemen, buying a commercial airliner and shipping weapons and gold around the world, Masood became temporarily unstuck while sowing the seeds of insurrection in Kashmir. Slipping into India
on false papers, hoping to galvanise a flagging local Muslim insurgency, he was captured by the Indian Army. It was this event that led to the kidnappings of July 1995.
The fate of Masood, and the bloodshed and intrigue that engulfed the six Western trekkers, would shape much of the epoch that followed. In the mountains of Kashmir that summer, Masood’s gunmen experimented with the tactics and rhetoric of Islamic terror, unveiling to the world extreme acts and justifications that would soon become all too familiar.
Finding and squeezing Western pressure points, testing foreign governments’ sensibilities and resolve, this hostage-taking would enable Masood and his men to refine their methods before they combined forces with Osama’s al Qaeda, soon assisted by the black-turbanned Taliban when they came to power in Afghanistan in 1996.
It would only be a short leap from the kidnappings in Kashmir to suicidal assaults in Srinagar, New York, Washington and London, in which many thousands would die or be injured. Three months after 9/11, India accused Masood of being behind a brazen raid on its parliament in New Delhi, an assault that was broadcast across the subcontinent, just as the Twin Towers had fallen before a live TV audience around the world.
In 2002, Masood’s bodyguard and one of his British recruits adapted tactics honed during the Kashmir kidnapping to abduct Daniel Pearl, a
Wall Street Journal
reporter, and to film his horrific beheading. Masood himself, like Osama, slipped from public view, becoming a shadowy
éminence grise
. In 2004 he welcomed several British Pakistanis back to the land of their forefathers, and in the terrorist training camps of north-west Pakistan he helped them plan for the mayhem they would unleash in London in July 2005, when four near-simultaneous suicide bombs went off in the heart of the heaving capital, killing fifty-two and injuring more than seven hundred.
In 2006, another of Masood’s British protégés manipulated
jihadi
recruits from the West to mount a complex plot to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic with liquid bombs smuggled
aboard in soft-drinks bottles. Many more plots in India, the US and the UK were narrowly thwarted, saving untold lives. By the time Osama bin Laden was run to ground in Abbottabad, many others from al Qaeda’s top table had perished too. Apart from Masood Azhar.
He continues to thrive, flitting today between Pakistan’s borders and his old home in Punjab. Four of the tourists seized in Kashmir in the summer of 1995, whose abduction foretold a new age of terror, simply vanished. Their bodies were never found, and their case was forgotten. Until now.
When the book was first published it provoked a storm in India, with the government challenged by national newspapers and cable news networks to respond, New Delhi giving the
New York Times
a date by when it would. That day came and went. However, lawyers in Kashmir representing the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), an organisation representing some of the estimated 8,000 Valley dwellers who are said to have vanished after being taken into the custody of the Indian security forces, picked up the baton. The organisation filed a petition with the Indian government’s Human Rights Commission in the spring of 2012, alleging that the army and government had deliberately misled the investigation into the kidnappings and withheld information. They also suggested that a criminal network had been formed between the kidnappers and government militiamen that worked together to keep the hostages hidden from view. They demanded the case file be made public and that senior policeman be called in for questioning. On April 17, the commission agreed to review the seventeen-year-old case, triggering headlines around the world, from
Fox News
in the US to the
BBC
in London.
By July, the police had declined to react to the judge’s request to produce the Al Faran file, with the Inspector General warned by the commission that action would be taken against him. Finally, on August 13, five months after the case was listed, the J&K police Crime Branch submitted its official response. They claimed that the master file, containing key evidence, ‘went to ashes due to a fire incident’. The
case is ongoing but the army and intelligence services are immune from investigation and will escape the probe.