The Meadow (63 page)

As the Squad contemplated a whole new, exhausting round of negotiations with a new and as yet unidentified kidnap group, an act of savage bloodletting slowed them down. Agent MMS, the brave young constable Mushtaq Sadiq had sent to infiltrate al Faran in the Warwan, was hauled out of a sewer in downtown Anantnag, killed and gutted, with a note pinned to his bloodied shirt denouncing him as a traitor.

Then the Indian Army struck too.

Late on Monday, 4 December, Kashmiri journalists were called to a hastily arranged press conference at the army’s headquarters in BB Cantt, Srinagar. Whenever Badami Bagh called, the Press Enclave ran. Shri Hari Haran, the army spokesman who took the rostrum, appeared to be in a good mood. The Rashtriya Rifles had just concluded a major operation, he said, and after an intense firefight involving several thousand men, a cell of battle-hardened militants had been shot to pieces in the paddy just beyond the village of Dabran, five miles south of Anantnag. A map was passed around, on which Dabran was circled. The gun battle had blazed for seven hours, during
which one civilian had unfortunately died, but three foreign militants had also been killed, with two captured alive. A picture was handed around showing several blood-spattered cadavers lined up on the ground, dressed in army-style coats over
kurta
pyjamas. The army had also recovered a large cache of heavy weaponry, Haran continued, showing photographs of six battered AK-47s, several machine guns, two high-powered VHF radio sets, a sack of grenades and coils of ammunition belts.

A current ran through the room as the journalists whispered among themselves. Everyone knew that Dabran was Sikander’s native village, and that for the past twelve months its residents had been forced to undergo a humiliating cordon-and-search operation every Wednesday evening as punishment for its most notorious son. Was the Movement’s southern commander Sikander among the dead, someone asked. No, said Haran emphatically. The three men killed were foreign fighters. The two taken alive were Kashmiri militants, but they came from Doda, in the state’s south, and were currently being interrogated. The journalists did not need to see a picture this time, as they knew what Haran meant: beatings, electrocution, cigarette burns, praying for death, with families left to wander between army camps searching for their missing loved ones. The press pack left to file identical brief reports. These sorts of encounters, even with this number of fighters involved, were run of the mill, and rarely made headlines.

Five days later, on 9 December, the army called the journalists back to BB Cantt for a significant update. One of the three militants killed in the Dabran gun battle had been positively identified as Abdul Hamid al-Turki. The journalists sat up. Al Faran’s famed commander, the Turk, a man who had had a reputation as one of the most austere and unpredictable
mujahids
, the kidnapper who had personally beheaded Hans Christian Ostrø, was dead. This was a
real
story. Army spokesman Haran beamed as the assembled journalists worked themselves up into a lather of questions. If the Turk, who had been in day-to-day charge of the hostages from day one, was dead, then al Faran was surely scuppered. What about the hostages? What could the
army say about their location? Haran shrugged. The hostages were still missing. But he could confirm that two senior al Faran fighters, Pakistani nationals Abu Khalifa and Nabil Ghazni, who newspaper men identified as members of the original al Faran team, had died alongside the Turk in the paddy. Four other unidentified men had escaped. Large amounts of cash, bogus passports and several ‘partially damaged’ Japanese SLR cameras had been recovered from the bodies, along with a standard field communications kit: two Morse keypads, a Chinese-made antenna, Japanese-made headphones and a VHF radio set.

What about the hostages, someone asked again. They had not been found, Haran replied. However, one of the captured militants had cracked: either the hostages had been abandoned ‘somewhere in the high ranges’, or they had been ‘handed over to some local militant group’. Either way al Faran had got rid of them before they were pinned down in Dabran. Haran had one more headline. The captured militants had admitted to being part of the group that burned down Charar-i-Sharief in May, a confession that finally placed the army in the clear over one of the most controversial incidents of the entire insurgency.

Handed over to some local militant group
. The journalists could not get back to the Press Enclave fast enough. ‘Indians Kill Leader of Kidnap Group’ ran the first wire story from AFP. As the day wore on, the headlines got worse: ‘Western Hostages Dumped by Captors’. And then: ‘Worry Rises for Hostages Seized in India’. Woken by a phone call from India in the middle of the night, Jane in Spokane got straight on to her liaison officer at the State Department. Reading between the lines, it sounded to her like a rescue attempt gone wrong. In Middlesbrough, Julie’s heart was clattering as she called the Foreign Office. If several of the kidnap party were dead, and the hostages had not been with them, where were their loved ones now, and who was holding them? She could barely bring herself to contemplate Keith, sick and weak after six months in captivity, locked forgotten, inside a
gujjar
hut, starving as the snow drifted against the door.

The Indian Home Ministry was deluged with urgent demands from London, Washington and Berlin. The Indian Defence Ministry
too. Why had no one been informed a rescue attempt was in the offing? But when General Saklani addressed the press, he made a spectacular backtrack. First, he wanted to make it clear that the Turk and the other militants had been killed in the course of a ‘routine’ cordon-and-search operation, and not during some secret manoeuvre to free the hostages. Second, al Faran had not been destroyed as a result of the Dabran operation: in fact, since the encounter its numbers had swelled. ‘Over a hundred al Faran militants are still guarding four Westerners in the forests of Kokernag in south Kashmir,’ an uncomfortable-looking Saklani said, to the consternation of everyone listening. Around the corner in Church Lane, for once Ramm and co. did not put a pin in their map. How could al Faran be on the ropes, and then suddenly be rejuvenated after its field commander and his deputies were killed? Only a short while back al Faran was beseeching the Hurriyat Conference to get India to the negotiating table, having also tried to get the women back to India in the hope of forcing New Delhi’s hand. And now it was claimed to be resurgent once more. Saklani’s story was nonsensical.

In response to the mutterings of disbelief in the media and diplomatic circles, the military establishment came out for a second go. A senior Defence Ministry spokesman in New Delhi said he wanted to downplay the intelligence gleaned from the interrogation of the two captured al Faran fighters. ‘They are hard-core militants, and can change their statement any time,’ he said, relegating what had previously been presented by the army as a certainty into no more than a possibility. By day’s end, a government spokesman in Srinagar was claiming that the hostages had just been spotted near the Mughal gardens of Noor Jehan, at Achhabal, six miles south-east of Anantnag. ‘All of the four were visibly healthy,’ he said.

Al Faran broke its silence. A fighter known to journalists contacted the Srinagar Press Enclave. Praising the Turk as a
shaheed
, he confirmed that his field commander and two other
mujahids
had been killed at Dabran, and that two others had been captured alive. He added that the statements extracted under torture were accurate. It seemed that the army had been telling the truth first time around.
Then al Faran confirmed what army spokesman Hari Haran had initially told reporters: it was no longer holding the hostages, three of whom had been ‘arrested’ by the Indian Army, while the fourth was ‘missing’.

If the spokesman was to be believed, this was a hugely significant moment. To a casual observer, the remark that three of the hostages were now in the Indian Army’s hands after six long months with al Faran would have seemed to be fantastic news. But why had the army not confirmed this? Those who knew Kashmir were worried. As far as militants were concerned, the word ‘army’ could also include its proxies, the renegades. Did the statement hint at some kind of murky deal behind the scenes, involving the ungovernable renegades? And where were the hostages now?

Three Arrested
.
One Missing
. No sign anywhere of Don, Keith, Paul or Dirk. The Press Enclave speculated feverishly about whether al Faran was lying, putting up a smokescreen or embellishing the truth, as it had done on so many previous occasions. Or was the army hiding the truth, the establishment issuing statements and revisions, corrections and addenda that had a whiff of panic about them? Journalists who had covered many surreal events since the militancy first sprung up knew not to rule anything out, including a militant propaganda exercise or a government plot. They knew all too well that Yusuf Jameel had only narrowly survived a sophisticated parcel bomb that an officer in the Indian Army stood accused of commissioning, and that had killed his best friend. To local ears practised in interpreting the conflict in Kashmir, the rapid succession of conflicting official statements suggested there was a dangerous game on somewhere in the valley.

Watching the army’s clumsy reversals, the Crime Branch Squad had at least felt vindicated that they had got to the heart of the action. Their source in Shelipora had revealed that al Faran had dumped the captives several days before the BB Cantt press conference. Al Faran had hinted at it in their statement after Hurriyat rejected them, the two captured militants had volunteered the information to the army,
after which al Faran confirmed it to be true. Now al Faran had put forward an altogether more worrying scenario, one that the Squad had already been contemplating for several days. But the Squad was still left with two key questions, amid the scores of smaller ones. Where were the hostages now? And what had happened to the deal between Alpha’s renegades and Sikander’s Movement that had assured al Faran protection from attacks by Indian security forces?

While the families fretted, not knowing what to believe, al Faran remained silent. But one week after the firefight at Dabran, the Squad made a breakthrough. Their agent in Shelipora called for a face-to-face meeting. What he had just learned could not be trusted to any messenger. It took days to set up, while the Squad worked out how their man could give his renegade associates the slip and get out of the fortress to talk to them. When he finally emerged it was to make a bold new claim: the hostages were still alive. Alpha, the paid-up government agent and wannabe politician of Shelipora, had personally taken control of them, and was concealing them at an undisclosed location.

Not knowing whether to be alarmed or relieved, the detectives tried to find out if the renegade commander was doing this on his own initiative, hoping to extort money from the government, or was acting on the orders of his handlers in the Special Task Force or Indian intelligence, as a precursor to a theatrical, headline-grabbing release. Was it all over? Had the Indians finally secured the hostages’ freedom? Or was this the start of something new and particularly cruel? One theory was that the hostages’ freedom was now close. ‘Another was that a monster who was much less predictable than al Faran now had the backpackers in his grip,’ a veteran Squad detective recalled grimly.

Then, nothing happened.

There was no public statement from the Governor’s office revealing the triumph of the security forces over al Faran, with the kidnappers tricked into handing over their prisoners. The Squad went back to its source, but the same story came back: Alpha was holding the hostages somewhere high in the frozen Anantnag hills, beyond his domain at Shelipora. The police squeezed all of their agents and sources,
securing only one more detail: Alpha had supposedly ‘bought’ the hostages from Sikander for four
lakh
(400,000) rupees, the equivalent of £8,000, a fraction of the sum Jehangir and Rajinder Tikoo had been negotiating their way to in September.

The Squad was incredulous: ‘We struggled to get the pieces to fit, but were continually told that Alpha was acting on orders.’ It had been established beyond doubt that al Faran had been ready to quit by the end of October, worried about being trapped in the valley over winter and preparing for a handover. ‘By mid-November, the kidnap party was spent and desperate to go home to Pakistan, giving up the operation,’ the Squad veteran said. With al Faran weakening and Sikander willing to consider any way out, the kidnap crisis was about to come to an end. But then Alpha was contacted by his handlers in intelligence and the STF, with orders to ‘approach Sikander with a deal’ to keep the crisis rolling.

The veteran said: ‘Everything pointed to the unthinkable, that some of Alpha’s hard-line government controllers told him to propose to Sikander that he should “take a break”, telling him al Faran “could regroup”. A few of Alpha’s most trusted men, led by the Clerk in Vailoo, would meantime take over the hostages, handing over a financial surety as proof that the captives would not be harmed. At the end of December, Sikander could decide if he wanted the hostages back, to recommence his al Faran operation, and if not they would be released.’ It appeared that there were some in the Indian establishment who did not want this never-ending bad-news story of Pakistani cruelty and Kashmiri inhumanity to end, even when the perpetrators themselves were finished.

The Squad reported some of its thoughts to its seniors, using these kinds of words: ‘Sikander’s men handed over Paul, Dirk, Keith and Don to Alpha’s renegades in the third or fourth week of November, around the time when the final sightings dried up. Sikander has given up. Al Faran is finished. Embarrassingly, India controls the hostages.’

Now that they had this intelligence, the Squad looked differently at the army operation in Dabran. They recalled what Bismillah, Alpha’s
drunken number two, had related inside fortress Shelipora: that the security forces had, right at the beginning, assured Alpha that when the time came they would ‘mop up’ the Movement and its commanders.