Lost to the World, page 4
Smart casual is the standard office garb, only this time I sported a newly won trophy: a Bulgari watch I had won in a senseless bet against my dear friend Hassan Elahi a week earlier.
It had been a fun night, and pretty typical of my time spent with my friends, most of whom I’ve known since childhood. We are a tight-knit group that grew up together, hence they are like family to me. I won’t go so far as to say the happiest times of my life were hanging out with my friends, but it’s definitely the time when I feel like myself in a room full of familiar faces—that’s when Shabby T comes alive.
That particular night felt like a bonus. I had wrapped up my business dealings and managed an earlier flight to go back home. As the plane took off for the three-hour flight from Dubai to Lahore, I settled into my seat with my usual mix of exhaustion and preflight anxiety. I have never been a big fan of flying, so I usually have a few movies downloaded on my iPad to watch as a distraction. I watched A Mighty Heart, a movie about Daniel Pearl, the American journalist kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, held hostage, and later beheaded by his abductors.
I did not know it was the last movie I would see for nearly five years. Or that soon I would live my own version of it.
* * *
That fateful Friday morning, per my routine, I walked toward my car, where my guard was waiting to accompany me on the short and normally uneventful journey to the office. My car battery had been giving me trouble lately, and as I cranked the engine, the car refused to start.
Parked conveniently nearby was my late father’s Mercedes coupe, which I climbed into. The car is a cozy two-seater, affording little room for a bulky guard. Plus, an array of electronic gadgets and a briefcase now took up the second seat. I waved away my guard, instructing him to get my SUV repaired.
After my father’s assassination, I developed a natural aversion to traveling with armed guards. On many occasions, I intentionally left the guard at home and was emotionally reprimanded by my worried mother, constantly concerned for her family’s safety. To allay her fears and to placate her, I would usually make an exception. Clearly, I had an excuse here. The sports car had no room for the bulky guard, a decision I will regret for a long time to come.
Unceremoniously setting off on the ten-minute drive to my office, I made a mental checklist, preparing myself to update my colleagues.
I had a feeling it was going to be a good day. Sadly, that was not to happen.
* * *
Here’s what I didn’t know.
As I left my neighborhood, a spotter named Farhaj Butt was waiting to notify his accomplices that I was on my way. I wasn’t in the car they expected, and because the Mercedes is low to the ground, he missed me. The next spotter, Usman Basra, didn’t. He was positioned at a crucial point on my route, an intersection where I’d typically choose to go one way or another. My mother had always insisted on the importance of taking different, random routes to work, a precaution against kidnappings and robberies. These dangers and hazards were prevalent in Pakistan; I neglected to pay heed. I was a creature of habit. I took my usual turn.
I crossed the bridge that takes you away from a cantonment residential area into Gulberg, a more commercial hub buzzing with restaurants, offices, and other public spaces, where men like my abductors go undetected. Basra relayed my position by phone. He notified a car full of men that I was on my way and which route I was taking. They set their plan into motion.
A week earlier, this same crew had sent Basra to scale a telephone pole on our block to install a video camera overlooking our home so they could watch my brother and me as we came and went. They wanted to understand our daily routine. We had no idea about any of this. A local street cleaner had passed by and startled Basra, so he never finished installing the camera. Even so, the crew already had a good idea of what time I usually left, where I went, and how best to intercept me. This team had done their homework and were perfectly aware of my movements.
I should also mention that the roads I travel to work aren’t hidden, treacherous back alleys. They’re busy commercial streets in the middle of an upscale neighborhood in Lahore. The cantonment, as the neighborhood is called, is a housing division controlled by the army. There are security checks at every point of entry and you need valid ID to get in or out. The idea that anything could happen to me in my short drive from home to work simply seemed unthinkable. This was my comfort zone. I remained oblivious of any danger, feeling no need for caution.
* * *
As I drove onto the street just a block from the office, parked inconspicuously on the side was a car packed with men. Quite naturally, I thought nothing of it. As I passed the car, I noticed one man in particular. He smiled at me. A strange smile. As though we knew each other. I thought he was just admiring my car. I later realized he was smiling because, so far, the crew’s plan was going perfectly.
Having passed their vehicle, the man stepped out, and I could clearly see he was holding a gun. He pointed his pistol at me. The other four men jumped out of the car, screaming and waving weapons menacingly, creating chaos and confusion. A few had pistols, and one held an automatic Kalashnikov rifle. They rushed at me, surrounding the car; uncharacteristically, I did not panic. I remained calm. My first thought was This is a robbery. These things happen in life. I could see that I was in for a bit of trouble, but I assumed it would be over quickly. I’d hand over my wallet, watch, and electronic devices. That was the norm, or so I thought.
The only valuable I wanted to protect, other than my life, was my car.
I don’t want them to get my car.
In my defense, it was not my car.
As the gunmen approached my vehicle, shouting at me and brandishing their weapons, I had the presence of mind to drop the car keys into the door panel. If this was a carjacking, at least I could make it more difficult for them.
* * *
In hindsight, I realize the value of a car pales in comparison to the value of one’s life. I should just have let them take the car. I assumed they would take my money and my watch and be gone as quickly as they came. A simple holdup.
But this was not to be. It wasn’t a carjacking, either. They made it abundantly clear.
I was the prize.
All of which started to dawn on me when one of the men yanked open my door and violently dragged me from the driver’s seat. His accomplice approached me to throw a hood over my head.
The smiling man put a gun to my head and whispered words that remain indelible in my memory:
“I’ve come for you, Shahbaz.”
* * *
When I recalled those moments later, I’d have plenty of time to think about them, hours and days and months to sit alone and scrutinize every detail. I wondered how things might have gone differently. The what-ifs remained unanswered, swirling in my mind. What if I’d taken a different car that morning? What if I’d heeded my wife’s advice and stayed home? What if I’d lingered in Dubai for the weekend as my old friend Sikander had urged me to do? What if my guard had traveled to work with me that day? I knew better than to regret that last one, though, that he didn’t accompany me. From what I learned about my captors over the next four years, I know they would simply have murdered him.
Once my captors had slipped that hood over my head, I had no more time to think. I heard shouting as they argued over what to do next. They hustled me into the back of their car, a cramped Toyota Corolla. I couldn’t tell what was happening, but I heard a lot of screaming. I was probably screaming too, a pure adrenaline reaction. It might even have looked funny if you were standing there watching us. A bunch of grown men shouting and yelling in a panic in the middle of the street, like something from an old slapstick comedy film.
I could tell that my kidnappers were panicking. Their plan was already fraying. They had to get off the street before they drew too much attention. I didn’t fully understand this at the time—I had a hood over my head. Plus, I was being physically assaulted. After they shoved me into the backseat we took off, leaving the fifth man behind to follow in my car. Or at least that was their plan.
But there was no key in my car.
With all of us jammed into the car, the kidnappers yelled at me and at each other. They kept punching me to keep me quiet until, finally, one of them drugged me with a syringe of ketamine, a tranquilizer normally used on horses.
I don’t remember much of what happened after that.
Many years later, I pieced together how my impulsive act of hiding the car keys in the door panel was the smartest decision I’d made.
* * *
My brother Shehryar got the news in Karachi when he landed from Lahore. “Shahbaz has been kidnapped.” Word of the scuffle in the street had traveled to employees in my office with news that I had been taken. To the first people who heard it, it sounded absurd. Taken? What? Where? How? But Shehryar knew immediately something was wrong.
He had the presence of mind to contact the concerned authorities in the intelligence agencies, an important wing of the army.
* * *
When the agents arrived at the scene, my car was still in the street. They’d already initiated surveillance called geofencing, by which they’d monitor the activity and movement of all cell phones through voice recognition, in the hope of tracing the kidnappers. Sadly, it was not successful, owing to severe traffic congestion of the last working day of the week.
The authorities also moved swiftly to activate a perimeter of roadblocks and checkpoints, in hopes of snaring the kidnappers before they left the city. Lahore is a sprawling metropolis, but there are only so many main roads in and out.
The net was closing in. Surely it would catch them. My ordeal would be over in a matter of hours. Or so my family prayed.
Except that, in the chaotic hour or so after I’d been taken, no one had yet communicated to the checkpoint officers what model of car my captors were driving. They were simply stopping cars and inspecting them briefly.
Other obstacles, other checkpoints, had to be bypassed before you could leave the city. I did not think of myself as a target, but because of my father’s stature in the country, the authorities were moving quickly to ensure my return. The assumption was that my captors would attempt to spirit me to one of the lawless areas in the remote outlands of Pakistan, which, in the end, is what they did. This is the usual pattern in high-profile kidnappings. Snatch someone off the streets of a city and move them to a safe house in a remote area hospitable to extremists.
But my captors were smart, at least about this. They didn’t try to leave the city at all. Not at first.
7
As my abductors sped away from the scene, all hell broke loose. I was drugged, unconscious, hidden in the footwell. The ketamine had knocked me out completely. On the occasional, brief moments when I regained consciousness, I was disoriented and clueless. I was unaware that, for the first thirty-six hours after I was snatched, the security and intelligence agencies and electronic media, along with every echelon of society, were focused on the unfolding of this high-profile incident.
I wouldn’t learn about any of this until months or years later. Some I learned from my captors, the rest long after I was freed. For example, I was to find out years later that my impulsive concealing of my car keys had both saved my life and would continue to keep me alive.
As my captors sped away, a man named Abdur Rehman, carrying a Kalashnikov, broke protocol by staying behind, greedily eyeing the Mercedes as a trophy to bag. He was a telecom engineer in his early twenties residing in Lahore, unremarkable looking and mild mannered—certainly not optics that I would associate with a terrorist.
Along with his brother, Noshab Rehman, another of my kidnappers, Abdur had been radicalized while still at engineering university. Both of them played an important role in the first sequence of my abduction.
Deviating from the original plan, Abdur Rehman decided unilaterally to take the sports car and planned to drive it to the safe house where I was to be held. There was one problem: when he got into my car, no keys were to be found.
He panicked and used his cell phone to call one of the spotters in the vicinity. This link led the authorities to their first breakthrough. Minutes after the call, Usman Basra arrived on a motorcycle to pick up Abdur Rehman.
Basra was not just another low-level conspirator. He was a trusted friend and right-hand man to the ringleader of the whole operation. This ringleader was the man who’d smiled at me from the car as I drove by and, I learned later, was the man who’d whispered to me, “I’ve come for you, Shahbaz.” He called himself Muhammad Ali. He was the most evil man I will ever meet.
Usman Basra was not just Muhammad Ali’s valued lieutenant; he was also engaged to marry Muhammad Ali’s fourteen-year-old sister-in-law. So, Basra was not just an expendable lackey. He was like a brother to Muhammad Ali. This made a huge difference in my case. But only because Basra got caught.
When Basra arrived on his motorcycle, the pickup did not go smoothly. The two men got into a heated argument over whether to bring the weapon. Basra, understandably, felt that it would attract too much attention to be carrying a machine gun as they sped away from the scene of a kidnapping. But Abdur Rehman apparently didn’t want to leave his beloved gun behind. Eventually, Basra prevailed and convinced him to discard the rifle.
Basra, to conceal his identity, was wearing a helmet, with his cell phone precariously placed in it. He hit a ditch in the road and the phone jostled free and dropped into the street. In all the panic and chaos, Basra didn’t notice. His focus was to escape the crime scene, and this cheap, disposable phone became pivotal in revealing the identity of the terrorists.
These two events, the breaking of protocol to try to snatch the car, and the use and subsequent loss of the cell phone, were the two big breakthroughs that led to the first piece of the puzzle.
Additionally, as I found out much later, two weeks before I’d been kidnapped, another high-profile abduction had taken place. A U.S. national, Warren Weinstein, was an aid worker/contractor living in Lahore, in an affluent area known as Model Town. Weinstein was cautious and traveled with highly trained ex-commando guards. He’d been grabbed as part of an intricately planned operation staged during Ramzan, when a gang of extremists distracted his guards with the offer of a feast, then stormed his compound and abducted him. I didn’t know anything about this. I’d never heard of Weinstein. The story had barely made the news. Plus, I had been traveling. Over the next four years, our fates became strangely intertwined. We would wind up miles apart, in the dangerous, unpoliced mountains of Pakistan. Sadly, only one of us would make it back alive. In the hours and days after my abduction, the investigation into Weinstein’s kidnapping led to an improbable, near-miraculous breakthrough in the investigation of my kidnapping.
* * *
The ISI agents arrived at the crime scene within an hour of my being taken. At first, they had nothing. No clues, no obvious evidence, and no initial theories about who might have abducted me or why. Their geofencing wasn’t turning up any useful leads. The assumption was that this was a typical kidnapping for ransom, likely conducted by al-Qaeda-related extremists or by the Tehreek-e-Taliban, as the Pakistani Taliban is known. Both groups had a history of such operations. The ISI agents believed that the modus operandi would be to whisk me out of the city as quickly as possible, then contact my family with ransom demands. If the demands were met, I would be released. If they weren’t, I would most definitely be killed. Victims were usually slaughtered as an example to the next targets and their families.
The ISI officer in charge of investigating my abduction was Colonel Kiyani, a veteran investigator with a kind face and a well-trimmed mustache. Kiyani had an excellent reputation due to his tireless work ethic. When he arrived to inspect my crime scene with his deputies, he’d simultaneously been working on the Weinstein case. They’d already identified a few suspects in that abduction. One suspect, an engineering student, told the ISI that he’d been convinced by a friend to acquire a vacant house to be used as a potential safe house. The name of that friend: Usman Basra.
At that point, Basra was only peripherally linked to the Weinstein kidnapping and not yet connected to mine. Kiyani and his team found no evidence to lead to a breakthrough. As the team interrogated eyewitnesses, they learned that one of the kidnappers had dropped a phone. It had disappeared. They did find the AK-47 that Abdur Rehman had reluctantly off-loaded.
Kiyani’s big breakthrough came later that day.
He, along with his team, went to the home of Usman Basra to follow up on a lead. Basra wasn’t there; his father and brother were. The agents convinced Basra’s father to phone Basra and urge him to come home immediately. “Tell him it’s an emergency,” Kiyani instructed. Basra’s father did as he was told, calling Basra, though not before the brother was able to text Basra and warn him the ISI were at the house, waiting for him. Fearing for his father’s safety, Basra agreed to return.
What the ISI agents didn’t know was that Basra was not at home because he was busy kidnapping me.
* * *
My kidnappers took me to a safe house in a respectable area of Lahore that they’d acquired anonymously through an intermediary. They knew that my kidnapping would set off a series of roadblocks and crackdowns, and it would be extremely hard to get me out of Lahore in the first twenty-four hours, so they’d decided to hide me until they had a chance to smuggle me out of the city. When Basra received the call from his father, he was at the safe house with me and the other abductors. He knew the ISI were waiting for him, but he also knew that they’d contacted him in relation to the Weinstein kidnapping, not knowing that he was deeply involved in mine.
