John Childs’s eyes popped open at 2am. The gunmen, with their straggly beards and turbans, who had abducted him and three other western trekkers from a campsite in Kashmir four days earlier, were snoring next to him. Now was the right time, thought Childs, 42, from Connecticut, as he eased himself out from under a rough blanket.
Lumping some clothes into the shape of a body, he stared at his sleeping fellow captives, their faces pinched by exhaustion. All of them had been frogmarched, vertiginously, for four days, reaching heights of 13,000ft. His fellow American among the group, Don Hutchings, had seemed affable and Childs had also got on with Britons Keith Mangan and Paul Wells in their brief acquaintance. They deserved better, Childs thought, but in this situation it was every man for himself.
Childs levered himself onto his feet and pushed aside the tarpaulin door of the shepherd’s stone shelter where they were being held, somewhere just below the snow line in the Pir Panjal, a range that encompasses the troubled Valley of Kashmir. He passed a sentry, gripped his stomach to feign dysentery and squatted down behind a tree.
Childs grabbed a handful of dirt and rubbed it over his face and into his hair to camouflage himself as best he could. He thought of his young daughters back home and also made a silent pledge to his fellow captives: “I will seek help and come back to you.” Then he bolted.
It was July 8, 1995 and Childs was not to know that the men he was leaving behind would become caught up in a slow-burning conspiracy that would take more than 16 years to unravel fully. Childs and the others also had no inkling that they had become ensnared in one of the first sorties in a new age of Islamist terror that would be punctuated with beheadings, hijackings, roadside bombs and suicide jackets.
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The “success” of the kidnapping — from the jihadist perspective — inspired others to target western civilians in an increasingly brutal fashion, a trend that persists to this day. Earlier this month saw the murder of a British and an Italian hostage being held by Islamists in Nigeria when a rescue was attempted.
Research undertaken for our new book also revealed how the lives of the Kashmiri hostages could have been saved if they had not been sacrificed to the wider agenda of the Indian authorities.
Their ordeal had begun when a dozen western tourists, mountaineers and walkers had camped in a place high in the mountains known as the Meadow, a riverside glade sown with wild irises. The advice they had received from tourist information kiosks in Delhi was that it was safe; it was other parts of Kashmir that were affected by spasms of violence.
Childs, a self-confessed loner, was there on his own and kept apart from the other tourists. Mangan, an electrician originally from Teesside, was with his wife Julie. Both aged 33, they had sold up in Tooting, south London, and headed for south Asia. Their 10th wedding anniversary was the following month and they intended to celebrate at the Taj Mahal. Also in the Meadow were the Mangans’ new travelling companions, Catherine Moseley and Paul Wells, 24, a couple who had met each other in Nottingham, where she was a social worker and he was an aspiring photographer.
At dusk one night, an indeterminate flickering had drawn Julie’s eye. Struggling to focus in the twilight, she thought she saw a group of men in robes between the pines. Within seconds bearded gunmen were upon them, demanding passports. Gripping Keith’s hand, Julie Mangan was filled with dread.
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A second armed group appeared with Childs in tow. “They were armed to the teeth with knives, semi-automatics and handguns,” he recalls in his first extensive interview about his ordeal and its aftermath. “The leader had the stillness of someone who had experienced real fear and survived it.”
He pointed his gun at the men in the group: “You, you and you.” Mangan, Wells and Childs scrambled to their feet. “I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye,” Julie Mangan says. “They just took off, the 10 armed men and our three.” The petrified women huddled together. “I don’t think they’re coming back,” Moseley recalls saying.
Further down the valley the kidnap party had seized Hutchings, a neuropsychologist from Washington state who was trekking with his wife Jane Schelly. As he was dragged away, “we just looked into each other’s eyes”, she recalls.
The hostages were then marched in circles, hopping between herders’ huts, guarded by masked men who smelt of guns and mutton fat.
They began to debate their strategy. The Britons wanted to wait to be rescued while Childs, a weapons engineer, said nobody was looking for them and any attempt to free them would be stymied by the terrain. Eventually, in the middle of the night, he made his decision to run.
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As he made good his escape he headed up, not down the mountain. Only a fool would climb into the deep freeze of the Indian Himalayas — and he hoped his pursuers would think the same.
For 18 hours he trekked through the woods and snow, the occasional sound of gunmetal on rock making him realise the search party had not been called off. Eventually, however, the only sound he could hear was the shrill descending whistle of a bearded vulture circling above.
Then came a stroke of incredible good fortune. An Indian army helicopter, on a routine mission monitoring thousands of Hindu pilgrims climbing to an ancient ice cave, reared up over a ridge.
Childs wasn’t safe yet. The crew had spotted him and assumed the lone figure was a terrorist plotting an attack on the Hindu devotees. A member of the crew recalls: “I was told to load a weapon and take that boy out.” But before he could shoot, the pilot, noticing Childs’s pale skin, intervened: “He’s a western guy.”
On the ground Childs was thrown into panic. “I was terrified. It was a big military thing with gun muzzles poking out of the window and men dressed in uniform.”
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To reassure him, the pilot moved the chopper so its tail faced the man below, showing the saffron, white and green of the Indian air force insignia, before setting down.
Hauled inside, Childs beseeched the crew: “We have to go back for the others.” His rescuers tried to calm him. “You’re safe now,” one told him. “You’re with the good guys.”
Childs was taken to Srinagar, where the traumatised wives and girlfriends were now staying at a government guesthouse. One of their guides had returned with a ransom demand. They knew the raiding party were Muslim extremists using a name — al-Faran — that local police had never previously heard. The hostages would be executed unless India released 21 Pakistanis held on terror charges.
There was more bad news. A woman arrived at the guesthouse and introduced herself as Anne-Katrin Hennig. A group of gunmen had appeared from nowhere that morning, she said, and had abducted her boyfriend. His name was Dirk Hasert, 26, a German student.
It was the kidnap gang who had been searching for Childs. They had found another tourist, too: Hans Christian Ostro, a 27-year-old actor from Oslo. Now there were five captives in the mountains.
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Childs was free and safe, but for the wives and families of the other men the trauma had only begun. Communications from the kidnappers came in fits and spurts. Photographs emerged of the increasingly gaunt hostages. A few taped messages materialised. The women made emotional pleas for the lives of their loved ones.
On August 13, 1995 a decapitated body was found in a remote grave. Police retrieved a head nearby and seeing its blond hair guessed that it was Ostro. Into his torso was carved “al-Faran”.
Concealed about his body and in the lining of his clothes were dozens of notes that revealed some of what the captives had been going through. Many more, scattered by him in the woods, had somehow been retrieved by villagers. “I am tired and stop for the night,” he wrote in one. “The sky is still blue but only very little from outside comes into this cell.”
Another addressed his family: “If I should die now, there will come bubbles of the tenderest love to those who are going to keep going with this life on earth which I have loved. The warmest hugs . . . I’m not afraid to die.”
Ostro’s family would later take solace in the fact that they had a body. For the others there would be no such closure. Mavis Mangan, Keith’s mother, says: “If those men holding our son wanted us to feel the terror, they certainly [succeeded]. This was real terror.”
Even Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistan’s prime minister, was haunted by Ostro’s beheading, telling us shortly before she was killed in 2007: “We were living in the days of innocence back then. We had never seen terror like it. But once the perpetrators had crossed the line there was no stopping them.”
This is where the fate of the Kashmir captives interlocks with the rise of the increasingly violent Islamist terrorists.
At the top of the kidnappers’ list of prisoners to be released was Masood Azhar, the portly head of a Pakistan-based terror group who was an ally of Osama Bin Laden. Both had cut their jihadi teeth fighting the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Then they moved on to Somalia and helped to arm the Islamists who shot down the American helicopters in 1993 in the incident that inspired the film Black Hawk Down. Azhar also travelled to Britain where, based at a mosque in east London, he had raised a fund to finance jihad and recruited British terrorist sleepers.
In 1994 he became temporarily unstuck. Slipping into India on a forged passport procured in Britain in the hope of boosting the insurgency in Kashmir, he was captured by the Indian army. This triggered the kidnappings of July 1995, which sought to free him. India refused to budge, repeatedly ruling out a prisoner exchange.
However, on Christmas Eve, 1999 after an Indian Airlines plane with 178 passengers was hijacked en route from Nepal to Delhi by members of Azhar’s outfit, the Indian government blinked. Azhar was freed, striding back to join his supporters, exhorting them: “Instead of shaking hands with each other, fill your arms with lightning.”
This they did. A year later a suicide bomber struck the army headquarters in Kashmir. The bomber was one of Azhar’s recruits, a 24-year-old student from Birmingham called Asif Sadiq. Three months after 9/11 Azhar’s group attacked the Indian parliament in Delhi. The following year his bodyguard and another of his British sleepers adapted tactics honed in the Kashmir kidnapping to trap Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, uploading his beheading to YouTube.
In 2004 Azhar’s men welcomed several British Pakistanis back to the land of their forefathers and in the terrorist training camps of northwest Pakistan helped them plan the carnage in London of July 2005. The next year another of Azhar’s British protégés led the so-called liquid bomb plot to bring down transatlantic airliners. While Bin Laden was finally run down last year, Azhar remains at large.
More alarming for the relatives of the men who were seized was the story of what had happened to them. In 1996 a photograph was produced of them looking healthy, which was said by the Indian authorities to prove they were still alive, and periodically there were witness reports. But after Kashmir opened up as the insurgency dwindled and its grim toll began to become apparent, with more than 6,000 mass graves of local civilian victims discovered, people began to talk about what had really happened.
The hostages had never been lost, maintained one of Kashmir’s most senior police officers, a Hindu with no axe to grind. He described in great detail how early on in their investigation the Indian authorities had learnt their whereabouts, finding the remote valley, the isolated village and even the wooden house in which the hostages were imprisoned, but decided to keep them and their kidnappers pinned down for 11 weeks. A decision had been taken high up the chain of command to let the crime run, blackening the name of the independence movement in Kashmir — and Pakistan, which backed it.
His account was backed by others in Indian intelligence, while another senior police officer, who ran secret negotiations with the kidnappers, revealed he had managed to strike a deal for the hostages, only for it to be blown by forces “in the top tier of government”.
Detectives tracking the hostages came out of the woodwork, revealing how they discovered that mercenaries had entered the fray in November 1995 as the kidnappers, frozen and hungry, were about to give in. These mercenaries, known as renegades, were surrendered Kashmiri fighters, turncoats paid by the Indian forces to hunt down erstwhile comrades. They bought the four westerners for £2,000 a head. The renegades then wiped out the kidnap gang, hunting them down one by one, before making the western hostages vanish too.
“Internal police files show that the hostages were executed on Christmas Eve in 1995, outside a small village called Mati Gawran, a five-hour drive up into the mountains ringing Kashmir’s southern city of Anantnag,” says one senior detective. “I knew then that we really had lost our humanity. This is the price of so many years at war.”
Some of the families are now demanding belated justice. Bob Wells, the father of Paul, told The Sunday Times: “For many years I suspected the authorities in India were not telling us the truth. To learn that some in power were actively deceiving us is far worse.”
This summer a case is to be lodged with the State Human Rights Commission in Srinagar pointing to the likely burial place of the hostages, demanding a new search and a criminal inquiry into their deaths.
Childs rarely talks about the events of 1995, even to his family. Did the kidnapping change him? He claims not, but increasingly he has sought out his own company. Eventually he left his job with Ensign-Bickford, an American aerospace company, and moved to the northeast Appalachians in the wild and wooded north of the United States, settling in a modest slatted house in a small farming community.
He dismisses the weight he carries as the only hostage to escape, while at the same time probing the reasons for his good fortune. “My belief, after all this time, is that I was lucky on that day,” he says. “For once my planets lined up, if that’s how you want to put it. I picked my strategy. I leapt and got away. But on any other day the same choice would have failed and I would have been caught, hauled back to the hut.”
He holds his head in his hands: “ ‘Why couldn’t you just bring Don with you?’ Jane [Hutchings] asked me.” The impact of those words have never left him.
“From the start I knew I had to escape. I sensed we would all die. My time came and somehow it worked out. In a struggle there can only be you. But, you know . . .” He pauses, half-closing his eyes. “Even today I can’t sleep between sheets. For the past 16 years I’ve slept on top of my bed, under a rough blanket, like the horse throws we slept beneath in captivity.
“I don’t know why. Maybe it makes me feel closer to my comrades who were left behind.”
The Meadow by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark will be published by HarperPress on April 2 at £16.99 (ebook £8.99). A Channel 4 Dispatches on Kashmir’s missing, The Torture Trail, will be broadcast on April 2