The Meadow (23 page)

At Aru, the Housegos had been taken to the Milky Way Tourist Bungalow, the run-down-looking establishment Paul Wells had photographed a year later, until his guide had urged him to move on, filled with a wariness that he chose not to share with his guests. Here the Housegos found another British couple, David and Cathy Mackie, who had been woken in the middle of the night by armed men who had raided the Milky Way. David told Yusuf, ‘The Mackies watched our arrival from a first-floor balcony, and said they had been told they would be released that night, after the militants moved out of the village.’

While they waited, David Housego got a closer look at the gunmen. ‘I could tell from their language and dress they were Afghanis and Pakistanis from the frontier, one of the Islamic fundamentalist groups that had been thrown up by the Afghan conflict.’ He worried that such men might be ruthless. ‘Night came. There was still no sign of us being set free.’ More militants arrived. ‘We began to feel apprehensive.’
After dinner, David and Jenny Housego and Cathy Mackie were called one by one into another room, on the pretext of writing down their names and addresses. ‘It was only when the door was locked behind us that we realised that my son and Cathy’s husband had been separated from us.’

In the middle of the night, David heard what sounded like the militants moving out. Restless and exasperated, at 4.30 a.m. he broke down the door of their room to find they were alone. ‘We searched the village, going with growing despair from house to house. No sign of Kim and David.’ Instead, they found a note in Urdu, left behind in the room where Kim and David Mackie had been. It demanded the release of three men: Masood, the Afghani and Langrial. The names had meant nothing to David.

At Pahalgam police station, where they reported the kidnapping, just as Jane Schelly would do thirteen months later, the Duty Inspector had ‘burst into tears’, setting Jenny off too. Afterwards the party had come down to Srinagar, ‘Cathy walking barefoot as her shoes had been stolen’, where the well-connected David had called up the Chief Secretary of Kashmir, the state’s most senior bureaucrat, who was a personal friend. Afterwards he had visited the offices of Rajinder Tikoo, the Inspector General of Kashmir Zone, one of the valley’s most senior police officers, and had spoken on the phone to Brigadier Arjun Ray, the army chief at BB Cantt. ‘Ray made it clear there was no question of prisoners being released,’ David told Yusuf. The Brigadier also said the army would not launch any rescue operation that would put the hostages’ lives at risk. David’s best bet was to try to get friends to bring pressure on the Pakistani government.

He suspected New Delhi would do little to secure the hostages’ freedom unless its hand was forced. He also believed that if the story was widely publicised, Kashmiris would not stand by while Westerners were sacrificed in the name of their liberty, especially when a blameless teenager was involved. His explanation complete, David glanced around Yusuf’s office. ‘That’s them!’ he had suddenly shouted, pointing excitedly to Mushtaq Ali’s photographs of Sikander, the Turk, the Afghani and Supahi. ‘They’re the ones who seized us two days back in
the Meadow!’ Now Yusuf knew something no one else did: that the Movement was behind the hostage drama, and Sikander was personally involved. He promised to help David any way he could.

Kim Housego and David Mackie would endure seventeen agonising days in captivity as pressure was heaped on the Movement and Pakistan’s civilian government. Yusuf Jameel had sent regular updates to the BBC, while David Housego did rounds of interviews, visiting Brigadier Ray and Rajinder Tikoo at his headquarters in the Batamaloo neighbourhood of Srinagar. At one point it looked as if the hostages would be killed, after Qazi Nisar, a highly influential
mirvaiz
, or chief cleric, in unruly Anantnag who had publicly agreed to help the families by acting as an intermediary was shot dead by masked gunmen. Some newspapers reported that the Movement had executed the priest, to stop him embarrassing them into surrender. The militant outfit issued a furious denial, insisting that Qazi Nisar was the victim of the Indian intelligence forces.

When Yusuf Jameel went down to Anantnag to cover Qazi Nisar’s funeral, he was not sure which of these stories he believed. ‘But whatever the truth, it was murky. And the hostages were still out there.’ The entire grief-stricken town ground to a halt as hundreds of thousands of mourners came out to bear the cleric’s coffin on high. Yusuf spotted Sikander in the crowd, surrounded by masked men. A furious Sikander strode over to him. ‘He blamed the media for the Movement being tarnished with Qazi Nisar’s killing. He said I had to set the record straight.’ Sikander demanded that the BBC run a piece right away, carrying his views. Yusuf refused, telling him that the one rule he stuck to in dealing with the army and militants alike was never to report anything under duress. A mob began to close in on the BBC man and his colleagues, young men instructed to pelt them with stones, forcing them to run for a waiting car which was damaged in the fusillade.

This time Sikander had really scared Yusuf, who vowed that he would not meet the Movement’s district commander face to face again. But a few days later he had received another breathless
middle-of-the-night call, instructing him to go to a roadside shrine between Anantnag and Aishmuqam, on the route up to Pahalgam. ‘I knew at once it was Sikander. He claimed that the hostages were about to be released.’ But Yusuf worried that he was being set up. He was torn. ‘I owed it to my good friend David Housego to do anything I could to help rescue his son,’ he said. But he owed it to his own family not to risk his life.

In the end, a compromise was reached. His photographer friend Mushtaq Ali volunteered to go for him. He too had the advantage of knowing Sikander personally, through the Major Bhupinder Singh affair, but he wasn’t wrapped up in the unpleasantness of the Qazi Nisar killing. Everyone would buy the pictures if Kim and David were released. Mushtaq set out, taking another photographer for back-up. Following Sikander’s instructions, they drove to the shrine, parked in a nearby poplar nursery and waited for a man to arrive carrying a watermelon, as agreed by Sikander.

Finally, a man had duly emerged with his fruit, and led a tense Mushtaq and his colleague to an empty building. They waited there for several hours, until Kim Housego and David Mackie arrived. It was a moment Kim would never forget: ‘Two rickshaws had taken us through the centre of town to a forest. We walked for a couple of minutes and saw journalists appearing from an empty house clicking with their cameras.’ After seventeen days of being moved around the Warwan Valley and Anantnag, Kim could not believe it. He sat down, ‘shaking with anxiety’, to be photographed by Mushtaq Ali. The Movement had coached him on what to say, and he repeated the story. ‘At the end the militants talked together and then announced that we would be freed to go with the journalists. “You shall be missed around here,” the masked commander said to me.’

As a parting gesture to cap the surreal mountain hike, Kim was given a gift, a clock that bore an inscription comparing the Indian Army to the Nazis: ‘Teacher – Hitler; Pupils – Indian Occupational Forces; with Best Wishes to Kim Housego from Harkat ul-Ansar International’. A few minutes later a grinning Mushtaq Ali emerged from the building, his arm around Kim’s shoulder. Before taking the
former hostages back to Srinagar, where their families were waiting, Mushtaq joked with Sikander’s emissary, asking if they could now eat the watermelon. The militant shook his head, and cracked the fruit open to reveal a hand grenade concealed inside. ‘My instructions were to kill you all if we were betrayed,’ he said, before discarding the melon and vanishing into the woods.

The story of the kidnapping did not end there. Still determined to win the freedom of Masood, the Afghani and Langrial, the Movement had struck again, this time in New Delhi in October 1994. Sikander had not been involved in this operation, as the Movement had instead used a British-Pakistani recruit, Omar Sheikh, who had been educated at the London School of Economics, and who used his familiarity with Western ways to lure three British and one American backpacker away from their guesthouses in the travellers’ enclave of Paharganj opposite New Delhi railway station, where Paul Wells and Cath Moseley would later stay. The Movement had issued a ransom note demanding the release of the three imprisoned militants, this one signed by a fictional group, al Hadid, meaning ‘the blade’. However, the plot was foiled when police investigating an unrelated report of a burglary stumbled across Sheikh’s hideout, leading to his capture and the freeing of the hostages, some of whom told of being chained to the floor, an indication of the increasing violence being meted out by an ever-hardening Movement.

After the New Delhi kidnapping there had been a lull. Until now: 4 July 1995, and this call from someone Yusuf was certain was Sikander. He cast his eye down the list of twenty-one names dictated to him. Here was the proof he was looking for. This time round the kidnappers were making the same demands as before. They wanted Masood, the Afghani and Langrial freed. And beneath their names was that of the British recruit Omar Sheikh, who was currently languishing in the high-security wing at Tihar jail, in New Delhi. It was clear to Yusuf what was going on: al Faran was the Movement, and the Movement was al Faran. Sikander, whose
jihadi
career to date had involved three separate kidnappings, had launched the Movement’s third serious attempt to win the freedom of Masood
Azhar and his comrades. But for now, as Yusuf prepared to file to the BBC, he kept most of this to himself. He needed to back up his surmises. Instead, his report would stick to the bare bones of the story.

Dirk Hasert and Anne Hennig, a young German couple taking a break from their college studies in Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Thuringia, knew none of this when they reached Dal Lake in Srinagar on 4 July. They had met as students a year earlier, during a film screening at Erfurt’s Anger Kino, and had come on holiday to Kashmir to widen their horizons.

Anne was a couple of years Dirk’s junior, but they had hit it off straight away, sharing a love of art-house movies and a desire to get away from the decaying eastern side of reunified Germany. Dirk had grown up in Bad Langensalza, an insular medieval city near Erfurt. The youngest and most rebellious of Christa Hasert’s three children, he had found it claustrophobic and depressing.

Dirk had longed to turn his back on what he saw as the dead-end Eastern Bloc. While his older brother Berndt and sister Birgit followed a more conventional route, he buried himself in magazines smuggled in from the West, imagining what it would be like to travel. After just scraping through his
Arbitur
exams, the German matriculation, Dirk made what his brother Berndt called ‘a break for freedom’, moving to the big city of Erfurt, where he chose vocational training over university. Berndt said: ‘Dirk didn’t stick at anything, and spent his days casting around Erfurt for something more fulfilling.’ Then, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, setting the twenty-year-old free.

Dirk immediately got a passport, saved up to buy an InterRail card and embraced his new freedom, pushing his budget as far as it would stretch, at one stage reaching Turkey. Gradually he stopped calling his siblings altogether, although he still contacted his mother once in a while. She was too old to change, he said: ‘Too much water under the bridge.’ She would never move away from Bad Langensalza.

At twenty-five, Dirk tried to figure out how to raise more money, in order to travel further and for longer. He went back into education,
getting onto a degree course in social education at Erfurt Polytechnic. That summer, 1994, before college started, he had made his most adventurous trip yet, a solo voyage to Iran and Afghanistan. ‘Everything he saw transformed his view of the world, sparking a fascination with religion, politics and spirituality,’ Berndt said. Dirk began his studies that autumn energised, and fell for an ethereal first-year student, Anne Hennig. ‘The region fascinated him,’ she recalled. ‘It was all Dirk would talk about for hours.’ She shared his curiosity, but was not so driven to explore. He was particularly interested in Islam, captivated by the way devout Muslims
lived
their religion, unlike Christians. Having coaxed Anne into coming with him on his next big adventure to witness Islam in its raw state, much as Paul Wells would talk Cath Moseley into going to Ladakh, Dirk began planning their trip for the following summer. After reading up on Asia and poring over maps, they agreed on Kashmir.

Stopping off in New Delhi at the end of June 1995, and feeling nervous about travelling to the valley, they had gone to the government tourism office to get advice. ‘Dirk was very careful,’ reflected Anne. They were given the usual reassuring story: ‘Stay out of downtown Srinagar and you’ll have the holiday of a lifetime.’ ‘And it looked like paradise in the travel guides we saw,’ said Anne, although like everyone else they were shocked when they flew in to Srinagar airport. ‘It was suddenly machine guns, razor wire and sandbags.’ As the J&K tourism police at the airport quizzed them – names, passports, hotel, itinerary – and Anne looked out into a crowd of unsmiling bearded faces, she began to get cold feet. ‘There were threatening signs,’ she said, worried by the overwhelming military presence.

However, once they reached Dal Lake, life slowed down on the calming waters. The people were open, the mountain views uplifting. They tried once again to pin down the facts, calling at the J&K state tourism office on 5 July, the day after the kidnappings. ‘Everyone assured us it would be OK,’ said Anne, unaware at the time that just a few blocks away in the UN guesthouse Jane Schelly, Julie Mangan and Cath Moseley were going through hell explaining their partners’ abductions. Dirk and Anne were advised by a policeman, Nasser
Ahmed Jan, to head for Pahalgam, ‘which was where other Westerners were happily going’. He said he would contact them if the situation changed, and waved them out, even though the newspaper on his desk was reporting the Pahalgam abductions and that the day before DSP Kifayat Haider had, unsuccessfully, recommended to his superiors that the trekking routes above Pahalgam be cleared of all Western holidaymakers.