The Meadow (51 page)

The guilt and fear soon got many in Pahalgam talking. One of the first taboos to be broken was the fingering of Sikander, with numerous residents identifying the man who up until this point had been seen by many as a local hero, as the
éminence grise
behind al Faran. The word on Pahalgam’s blustery single street was that Sikander, who informers claimed had been in and out of the town in recent months, had been working with his Pakistani controllers to coordinate a kidnapping operation that had its roots as far back as January. Someone said that while Sikander was supervising the operation, the man in charge on the ground was a foreign militant called the Turk, who had been operating in Kashmir on and off for a couple of years, and who ‘dressed like a holy man but had a reputation for brutality’. Residents also identified the Turk’s deputy as Qari Zarar, a Kashmiri-born militant from the southern side of the Pir Panjal mountains, a man who saw himself as a leader, but whom the Squad marked down as ‘second fiddle’.

Under interrogation, former militants and sympathisers named the two most important Pakistanis in the kidnap party as Nabeel Ghazni and Abu Khalifa. Both were said to have trained in Camp Yawar, and to have had lengthy battlefield experience in Afghanistan. Backing up Ghazni and Khalifa were two Kashmiris from Doda district: Sikander Mohammed and Mohammed Haroon. These four veterans made up the tier of command beneath the Turk and Qari Zarar, and were all thought to have been accompanying the hostages from Day One. Sadiq’s team sent a report to the higher-ups along these lines: ‘It should be noted, that we have identified the core members of the kidnap party etc. etc. …’

The rest of the gunmen were known only by their fighting names: Shoaib, Waheed, Asif, Yusuf, Jawad, Batoor, Ghazan and Droon, the
last three being Pashtun names, suggesting that they originated from the Pakistan–Afghan border. The others, as far as the Squad could ascertain, were mostly Pakistanis from Kotli or Mirpur, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Lastly, there were a number of
gujjars
and
dards
, impoverished shepherds and hunters whose hennaed hair and kohl-rimmed eyes marked them as outsiders, and who came and went. Their job was guarding the heights above the hostage party, and acting as lookouts and sentries outside the
gujjar
huts where the hostages spent their nights. A photo of some members of the kidnap team was even procured by the Squad, that a fighter had presumably taken using a camera he had stolen from the hostages, and gone to the lengths of getting developed. It showed five men in battle gear, smiling broadly on a grassy hillside at the height of summer, arms around each other’s shoulders, Kalashnikovs at ease, daggers hanging from belts. ‘On tour with al Faran,’ one of Sadiq’s officers quipped. A copy was placed in the file, where it remains today. When it was shown to John Childs many years later, he instantly recognised the tall, smiling militant on the left of the picture. ‘That’s the one I arm-wrestled,’ he said. ‘One of the more reasonable of our captors.’

Within three days, the Squad had drawn the higher-ups’ attention to its first significant conclusion: ‘Al Faran is meaningless.’ The Squad believed the kidnappings had been carried out by the Movement, an ISI-sponsored Pakistani militant group mentored by Maulana Khalil from Karachi. A report was sent along the lines: ‘It should be noted, that we have linked … etc.’ The team also had proof positive of an overlap between those responsible for the 1994 abductions of Kim Housego and David Mackie and these kidnappings, as many in the present kidnap party were known to have worked both operations.

The next task was far harder. The Squad would need to infiltrate the Movement and track down Sikander, who was thought not to be travelling with the kidnap party but holed up in a Movement safe house. Their ultimate goal was to get someone into or alongside the al Faran team, an ambitious task, but one they thought possible. They started with the Movement’s allies in and around Pahalgam, trying to see who might be flipped. They also activated their own sources out
in the deep countryside, and all the way down to Anantnag town: assets, paid and unpaid, volunteers and those who had been press-ganged, rural people over whom the police already had the clamp, and who could be made to befriend and then betray the men around Sikander – in the knowledge that their lives (and those of their families) depended on it.

It began in Dabran village, with Sadiq’s men targeting Sikander’s childhood home, close to the village’s communal wash-house and general store. Throwing the Bhat family’s possessions into the mud, the security officials threatened to return every week and do it again, until they talked. This prompted Sikander’s desperate father, Ghulam Ahmed Bhat, to bury what keepsakes they had to remind them of their son in the garden – a school bus pass, ID card and birth certificate. ‘I also took the only photo we had, placed it in a bag and pushed it deep beneath a bed of vegetables,’ he recalled.

In the first days after the kidnappings the Squad struck continually in Pahalgam, tearing apart Sikander’s associations: door-to-door midnight arrests, the lightning application of brutish force. This flushed out the revelation that the kidnap team had not headed higher into the mountains after snatching the first four backpackers on 4 July, but had brazenly descended into Pahalgam at 2 a.m. on 5 July – right into the hive of police and paramilitaries. Could this possibly be true, Sadiq wondered. Sikander was bold, but would he choose such a high-risk strategy while his team was holding foreign hostages? It seemed unlikely, but when several eyewitnesses came forward to describe how a small procession of militants had snaked its way down the mountain and into the slumbering trekking station in the early hours of 5 July, over a small wooden bridge and into the Heevan Hotel, the story began to have a ring of truth about it. Some of those working at the Heevan were already under suspicion of secretly supporting and working for Sikander’s outfit.

The Squad raided the Heevan Hotel early on 6 July. Their search led them to a tatty, unpainted attic room with boarded-up windows, a small, airless chamber where it was impossible to stand up straight because of the protruding eaves. It was empty, but there was plenty of evidence that it had recently been occupied: ‘The tea in the cups was warm, and breakfast plates and bedrolls were still scattered around,’ said an officer who witnessed the scene. In the bathroom, a dank and dirty corner, a tap was still running, and on the floor were foreign food wrappers and scraps of paper. The detectives questioned the hotel staff, eventually finding an old Kashmiri
chowkidar
, or night-watchman, who confirmed that an armed party had turned up at the hotel in the early hours of 5 July. He had shown them to the attic room, and been ordered to look after them.

Were the foreigners among them, the interrogators asked, pressing him hard. The
chowkidar
seemed evasive, saying that it had been dark. All he did know was that he had heard through kitchen staff that the Movement had abducted a group of foreigners from a campsite in the Lidderwat Valley sometime the previous evening. ‘It was already the talk of the town,’ he whispered. ‘Everyone knew.’ Later, he had listened at the door, and overheard men speaking about hostages and ransom demands. They seemed to be communicating with others via a two-way radio. ‘He was sure those inside the room were leading the kidnapping,’ said a member of the Squad’s interrogation team.

By now the
chowkidar
was terrified, and he clammed up. In an attempt to clarify the story, the Squad found a young Kashmiri waiter who also worked at the Heevan, and who admitted (under brusque questioning) that he had taken food up to the room several times over the following forty-eight hours. Slowly, the frightened boy drew a vivid picture of a group of men sitting quietly in a darkened room, whispering occasionally, with heads bowed. He had only snatched a few glimpses, as at all times the door had been guarded from the inside by two foreign
mujahideen
, while two more kept watch outside, and others were positioned at the base of the stairwell and around the rear of the hotel, close to the kitchens and refuse bins. To the Squad it
was clear: they had uncovered al Faran’s base camp, brazenly established in the town itself.

The boy described how the party in the room had repeatedly called for food and drink, and he had brought up trays of tea,
chapattis
and
daal
fry. A string of thickset Kashmiri militants had arrived throughout the night, smelling of gunmetal and goose fat. From the reaction of the guards, the boy said, some of them must have been senior commanders.

The next time the door was unlocked he had caught sight of a clean-shaven man, dressed like a schoolteacher in a shirt and jacket, with an instantly recognisable face: Sikander. ‘What did he say?’ the police interrogators demanded. ‘What was the plan for the hostages?’ The boy could not recall much, as he had only overheard snatches of conversation. At one point Sikander had said, speaking quickly: ‘
Kya tumne dopehar ka khana khaya?
’ (Did the hostages have their lunch?) ‘No,’ a distant voice had replied. ‘They are hungry and getting agitated. They keep asking questions about when they will be freed. What should we say?’ The boy said he thought he had heard the crackle of a two-way radio.

‘
Maze karein
,’ Sikander had said, instructing the captors to eat well. The men in the room had then slept for an hour, the boy stated, until their first
namaz
prayer of the day, around 5 a.m. Over the next three hours the room’s occupants had spoken on the radio several more times, and slept again, until more food arrived after 9 a.m., oily fried eggs and flat bread that everyone wolfed down, after which they were ordered in Urdu, ‘
Khamosh raho
.’ Silence. Several gunmen raised their Kalashnikovs to their lips as a rumpus started below in the hotel proper. Guests were awakening, and their breakfast babble rose through the floor with the smell of buttered toast, bringing fresh tension into the attic room.

Some tourists had their breakfast on plastic chairs and tables arranged on the lawn overlooking the Lidder River. The Heevan Hotel was the plushest spot in town, its literature boasting ‘exclusively furnished rooms and suites with wall-to-wall carpeting’. A grand reception area panelled with pine led to a travel centre, banqueting
hall and what was described as a ‘multi-cuisine’ restaurant, which meant that a few Kashmiri specialities – meats prepared in yoghurt and almond-flecked green tea – were served alongside Indian staples from the Punjabi north and the Tamil south. From the corridor beneath the attic room came a girl’s muffled laugh and a man’s response. Trekkers were setting out for the high passes, excited and fired-up. If only they had known what was going on just above their heads. Snatches of conversation floated up from the garden. Someone was talking about a walk up to Aru and Kolahoi. A man was discussing the Amarnath routes with his wife.

Later, noises had come from the street outside. The
chowkidar
, who appeared from the file transcript to have undergone many hours of intense interrogation despite his advanced age, admitted he had gone to see what was happening. A group of Kashmiri students who had been camping in the Meadow had arrived in the town and raised the alarm about the kidnapping. The waiter recalled the same incident, and said that soon after, the party in the attic room had moved into a corner, far from the window.

The
chowkidar
recalled another loud commotion outside, which included foreign voices, at around 2 p.m. Again he had slipped out. ‘Several women had arrived from Lidderwat,’ he said, ‘telling everyone there had been a kidnapping up in the mountains.’ The Squad had underlined these words in the interrogation report, clearly struck by the image of three Western women out in the street calling for help, unaware that the men who controlled the fates of their loved ones were just yards away, listening to everything that was going on.

By sunset on 5 July the noise outside had died down as Pahalgam settled in for the night, recalled the boy. The party in the attic room stayed put too, while outside a local police inquiry was unfolding, with DSP Kifayat Haider arriving from Srinagar. But by the early hours of 6 July, the al Faran party was fractious and jumpy, arguing among themselves. The next thing the
chowkidar
remembered was around 4 a.m., when he heard the men in the attic room being ordered to dress: ‘Get up, take your things, we have to move.’ Shivering as they emerged at the bottom of the stairwell, they had made straight for a
narrow alley. ‘Quick, quick, out of sight!’ a gunman had shouted, pushing them into the darkness, away from the Heevan Hotel, out of Pahalgam and up into the silent Betaab Valley in the general direction of Amarnath, where, as John Childs would later confirm, the hostages and kidnappers were holed up.

There, the interrogation notes ended. A second report in the Crime Branch file consisted of a medical statement that sometime on 7 July the Heevan’s
chowkidar
had collapsed during interrogation. His questioners’ names had been redacted from the official report, their alarm hinted at by the correspondence and the forms they filled in about the incident. A doctor was called for. He took one look at the old man, pronounced him dead and turned on his heels. As news got out about the
chowkidar
’s death during interrogation, Pahalgam bridled, with youths pelting a police post with stones, haranguing DSP Haider, accusing his officers of torturing an old man to death.

‘A cop among the people’, as he liked to think of himself, DSP Haider depended on the good will of the local populace. But on the morning of 7 July, when he had arrived at work to find Pahalgam police station besieged by furious locals, he had had no idea what was going on. He rang SP Mushtaq Sadiq and his superiors for an explanation. An internal investigation was promised, and the Squad called in another doctor to examine the
chowkidar
. He concluded that the old man had had ‘a weak heart that could explain his passing’. With insufficient evidence, and one opinion in their favour, Sadiq’s Squad was in the clear. They moved on, focusing on Amarnath in their search for the hostages. As Qari Zarar and two others among the kidnappers were from Doda, a district far to the south-east of Pahalgam, the Crime Branch team had a good idea of where they might be headed. Beyond Amarnath lay the wild passes and remote valleys of the Pir Panjal, and little-used nomad routes that led towards an untamed land without electricity or telephones, a place of perma-winter.