DEATH VALLEY

Two months ago, British backpacker Anna Bartlett came to Kullu in
northern India in search of peace, tranquillity - and the world's
strongest hash. A week later, her battered body was washed up in a
river.

Jason Burke retraces her steps to discover why murder, corruption and
drug trafficking are flourishing in the foothills of the Himalayas

The Observer

Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, is a week away and there are
dozens of stalls along the rough edges of the main road into the Kullu
Valley. Each is half obscured by gold or crimson tinsel and grubby
children.

The stalls are selling fireworks.

In every town and village across northern India, even those up here in
the foothills of the Himalayas, rockets with obscenely short fuses,
Catherine Wheels designed to be thrown when lit, mercury-laden
sparklers that blind anyone who looks at them for too long, and
shelves of horrifically loud bangers are being wrapped in newspaper
and placed into small, dirty, eager hands.

Vashisht, a village halfway up the valley, is little more than a
scattering of wooden-walled traditional houses, a few small concrete
hotels and a temple slung across a wooded hillside at an altitude of
7,000ft. At the end of the single cobbled street is the Negi
guesthouse. There is no one in when I call, except a toothless Italian
who has been living there on and off for months and Jimmy, a Japanese
traveller in a filthy T-shirt with some kind of skin disease.

A room is 75 rupees (?1) per night.

It is late afternoon and I stand outside room 16 and look south over
the broad valley, where the low light is picking out the pines and the
black crags and the slate roofs of the houses in the town of Manali
three miles away. To the north the high mountains, dusted with the
first snows of winter, are very white above the grey and brown of the
boulder fields, carving a sharp outline against the fading blue of the
sky. There are worse views to wake up to on your last morning on earth.

Anna Bartlett, an attractive, open-faced 25-year-old from
Southend-on-Sea, arrived in Vashisht on 25 September and booked into
the Negi guesthouse. Three months earlier she had been released from a
prison in the United Arab Emirates after serving two-and-a-half years
of a 25-year sentence for drug smuggling. She was pardoned on grounds
of ill health and deported to the UK. At home in Southend, she gave an
interview to a tabloid newspaper about her conviction and time in
prison. 'What I did was selfish and evil,' she said. 'I am just
pleased to be alive - I can't wait to get on a bus and go for long
walks in the countryside.' A few weeks later she was in the Kullu Valley.

There are many wonderful things about the Kullu Valley. There is the
clear, clean air, astringent as ammonia; there is the scenery; the
fact that you are in India; that an excellent meal of tandoori chicken
and fresh curried vegetables costs about 50p; there is the laid-back
backpacking scene; the ski-mountaineering and trekking.

Then there are many terrible things about the Kullu Valley, things
that you don't notice at first, and might miss entirely on a swift
visit, if you were travelling through on your way up to the high
plateaux of Ladakh, for example, or across to war-torn Kashmir, or the
exiled Tibetan Buddhist centre of Dharamsala to the west. You would
probably miss the fact that nearly two-dozen Westerners have
disappeared in the valley in the past decade, that there has been a
series of attacks and violent robberies on travellers, that skeletons
turn up in sleeping bags, that the stunning hills and gorges hide a
community of freaks, dropouts and drug dealers far from the reach of
embassies or even the local police; that roads have brought alcoholism
to local communities as well as access to markets; that grinding
poverty persists.

And, of course, you might miss the fact that Kullu is where you find
the finest hashish in the world.

Anna Bartlett's body was discovered early in the morning of 2 October,
washed against the base of a bridge over the swift, foaming,
mica-flecked river that bisects Manali, cutting off the old town - all
wood houses, slate roofs and wood smoke - from the concrete,
exhaust-filled new town. At first the police thought she had committed
suicide.

Then they discovered that there was no water in her lungs and
concluded she was dead before she entered the water.

The daughter of a retired English teacher and a library assistant,
Anna Bartlett did well at school and won a place at Brighton
University. She smoked cannabis and tried acid and ecstasy.

Before going to university she decided to take a year off, did some
voluntary work in Tanzania and then travelled to India.

In Goa she took a lot of drugs - 'Everyone travelling does,' she later
said - and met Stacy Simpson, an older British man.

In May 2000 Bartlett returned home and suffered a mental breakdown,
which she later attributed to drug use. She told a newspaper that
shortly afterwards, in September 2000, she was contacted by Simpson
and asked if she would meet him in Holland. In an Amsterdam hotel room
she swallowed 50 lipstick-sized plastic-wrapped packages of cocaine,
ecstasy and hashish with a street value of ?100,000, washing the drugs
down with litres of orange juice. Her payment was to be ?1,000.

Bartlett got the drugs into Dubai, but the local police were watching
another courier in the same team. She led them to Bartlett, who was
arrested in a hotel room with the drugs.

In May 2001 she was sentenced to 25 years, narrowly avoiding the death
penalty.

After two years in an overcrowded prison, sleeping among cockroaches
and rats on the floor, Bartlett was pardoned on mental-health grounds
and released.

Kullu police say they have pieced together Bartlett's last hours,
though they admit they are unsure of their account.

The investigation is headed by 32-year-old Superintendent AP Singh.
Singh's office is in Kullu, the eponymous valley's main administrative
centre, about 30 miles south of the town of Manali. It is a small
white bungalow that appears not to have changed since the days of the
Raj. Parked outside is an official car, a white Hindustan Ambassador
with a blue lamp on top, with a flag and a burnished brass plate
announcing Singh's title.

Police sentries sit on chairs in the shade with their old .303 rifles
between their thighs and small cups of sweet tea at their elbows.

Singh says that Bartlett left her lodgings in Vashisht during the
afternoon of 30 September and crossed the valley into old Manali. By
early evening she and four men were drinking Indian whiskey and
smoking hashish in the Shiva Ashram guesthouse. The owner of the
guesthouse, a local called Lot Ram, known to police for his recent
prison term for robbery, was one. Another was 'a Nepalese fellow by
the name of Santosh Gorka'. The other two were Adrian Breathnach, a
40-year-old from Tipperary, and Frank James, a Dubliner. Both men,
says Singh, are methadone users.

The drinking and smoking continued un-til well past
midnight.

James returned to his lodgings some time around 1am, as did Gorka.
Bartlett was unable to make her way back to Vashisht. According to
Singh, Breathnach has told police that he passed out some time in the
early hours, waking at around 4am. He said that Bartlett and he had
bought 3g of 'brown sugar' (partially refined heroin) from Lot Ram
earlier in the evening.

It had been left on a table in his room. He took some and then passed
out again.

When he awoke at around 8am he found that the rest of the heroin was
gone and Bartlett was still on the floor.

She had blood trickling from a nostril and had stopped
breathing.

Singh claims Breathnach has told police that, on noticing the
apparently lifeless girl, he called Lot Ram and the two men tried to
revive her, slapping her and pouring cold water over her. Breathnach
then telephoned James, who came over. Gorka joined them. The three men
stayed with 1/4) the body during the day and, in the evening, made a
makeshift stretcher out of wood and cloth, loaded it with Bartlett's
apparently lifeless body and carried it to the river, dropping it once
on the way, headfirst, on to a road. 'This,' says Singh, 'is
substantiated by the bloodstains at the place where she is meant to
have been dropped.' Then they dumped the body into the water.
Breathnach and James walked into the Irish embassy in Delhi and gave
themselves up four days after Bartlett's death.

Yet, Singh says, there are 'loose ends in this case'. The autopsy
showed that Bartlett died because of head injuries.

There were lacerations to the face, the left cheek was puffed up,
there were contusions on the nose and forehead and an injury at the
back of the head 'consistent with a blow administered' or 'a fall'.

'We are waiting for the toxicology report.

She may have died of an overdose. She may have been alive when they
loaded her on the stretcher - we simply do not know yet,' Singh told
me. The room at the Shiva Ashram had been 'scrubbed clean' by the time
police reached it, he said. At the Negi guesthouse, the police found
Bartlett's belongings, including a few vials of ketamine, a veterinary
medicine for horses that has a powerful hallucinogenic effect on
humans, around $700, and her passport, issued in London in October
2000. There is a neat, girlish, slightly shy signature.

In the summer the average tourist population of the Kullu Valley is
50,000. Most are Indian. Manali itself now has 14,000 registered hotel
beds, with many more unregistered. The mass tourism has helped the
state of Himachal Pradesh develop quickly, funding massive literacy
drives and infrastructural programmes, but has also meant that Singh
and his 238 police officers face an increasingly hard task. 'In the
past few years we have seen a shift from crimes associated with rural
areas to all the criminal activity associated with a big city,' Singh
said. 'That includes rape, murder, organised prostitution and drug
dealing.'

One particular concern of the police is growing narcotic use among
young locals. Smoking hashish, at least among adults, has been part of
the local culture for as long as anyone can remember.

Young Kullu boys sniffing bonded resin or eating toast spread with
analgesic cream is not.

But then, this surprises few who know the valley.

Drugs are taking over in Kullu. The drug industry here may be
relatively disorganised, at least compared with opium in Afghanistan,
methamphetamine in Southeast Asia or hash in Lebanon or Morocco, but
it is still the biggest drug-producing area in India and, though most
produce is consumed locally, a considerable quantity finds its way to
Europe. 'Malana cream', named after the village which is the centre of
hashish production in the area, is sought after by the smoking
cognoscenti in the West. In Amsterdam coffee shops a pre-rolled joint
sells for U15.

The malana cream smoked in the West is usually mixed with
opium.

So, as it does not grow locally, dealers are now smuggling opium into
the valley to mix with the hashish prior to export.

It's a lot easier to do it up a hillside in India than on a farm
outside Utrecht.

Drugs production in Kullu remains a cottage industry.

The crop itself is grown by villagers, particularly in the valley of
the Parvati River. The valley, an offshoot of the Kullu Valley, is all
precipitous gorges, cliffs, rushing streams and waterfalls. But
cannabis thrives in the most unlikely places. The thin earth of the
terraced fields or the clearings in the woods support plants 3m or 4m
high with stems as thick as a wrist.

Seeds, increasingly of an imported, genetically altered variety with
more of the hash-heavy female plants and with leaves of a greater
surface area, are broadcast on the soil in the spring.

Dealers then purchase the crop for a set price - currently around
50,000 rupees (?650) for a field of 15 acres. When the crop is
harvested the dealers usually hire the family of the farmer - and
anyone else available - for around ?10 per day, 10 times the standard
day wage for an agricultural labourer, to 'rub' the hash. This
involves taking the cannabis leaves and buds and rubbing them between
one's hands. An oily residue builds up on the palms.

By this method a 15-acre field will produce 'rub hashish' worth around
?400 at the 'farm gate' and at least ?25,000 in the UK. Singh
estimates that there are 50,000 acres of cannabis under cultivation in
the Kullu Valley.

The system, which is hundreds of years old, also makes it easy for
outsiders with the right contacts to enter the chain.

You simply buy up a harvest and walk off with the drugs.

Though much of the crop is still bought by local dealers, in the past
few years Westerners have begun encroaching. A few score live up in
the hills all year round.

Many more arrive each spring, buy a field, spend a summer up in a
village smoking and watching over the crop and then, in the autumn,
take the harvest down to Goa to sell to backpackers at a sufficient
profit to cover all costs and do the same the next season.

Singh and his predecessors have arrested 82 foreigners for dealing or
possession of drugs since 2001. They don't bother with anyone carrying
less than 4oz. The arrests include 18 Italians, 12 Britons, 10
Israelis, as well as Australians, a Finn, a Palestinian and a Pole.
The big players don't get caught, apparently, as they hire cheap
Nepali labour to smuggle the drugs out of the valley.

In the summer there is no need to smuggle the drugs
anywhere.

Kullu is full of Europe's youth.

Thousands of backpackers pour into the valley, do a little trekking, a
lot of smoking and, increasingly, a lot of cocaine, speed, E and heroin.

No chemically processed drugs are produced locally, so they all have
to be brought into the valley.

In June and July huge 'full moon' parties are held by the banks of the
Beas River. There is little the police can do.

At the narrowest point of the Parvati valley is Manikaran. The village
has some hot springs, a Hindu shrine, a Sikh Gurdwara (a huge complex
to accommodate pilgrims) and more cheap hotels, all with names like
Paradise Meadow or Snowy Honeymoon. Above the village, the gorge opens
out into broad pastures.

A battered taxi takes us up the valley.

A week earlier, in Delhi, I had met investigators from Group
4-Securitas, who run a missing persons bureau in the city. They had
told me to go to Manikaran but had warned me to be careful. In the
past decade or so, around 20 Westerners have been reported missing in
the Kullu Valley. Few are found.

Many appear to have spent their last hours or days in or around the
village.

In 1996 it was Ian Mogford, a 21-year-old student at Bristol
University. He made a phone call home wishing his brother a safe trip
to Australia on 23 August of that year and has not been seen since.

Then there is Ardavan Taherzadeh, a Canadian graduate who vanished in
May 1997, shortly after being seen in the village.

Group 4-Securitas believe Taherzadeh was murdered less than a mile
away and that the headman of a local settlement protected his killers
and concealed the body.

Certainly, it was a Manikaran man who later offered agents the
Canadian's personal effects for 10,000 rupees.

Maarten de Bruijn, the 21-year-old son of a banker from Rotterdam,
passed through Manikaran in the summer of 1999. It was the last place
he was seen alive.

And there was Alexei Ivanov, a Russian economist, who went missing in
April 2000 on the plateaux just above Manikaran, and was last spotted
in the village.

The only trace found of him was a Russian-made oxygen bottle,
recovered after his mother, a colonel in the Russian army, hired a
private security firm to search the hills nearby. Even the first
person on the three-page list of the missing I have been given by the
Kullu police, 30-year-old Marianne Heer, from Switzerland, was last
seen in Manikaran temple in October 1992.

So what happened to these people?

There are three possibilities. The first is that they died in an
accident.

The hills around Kullu are beautiful, but they are high and dangerous
and no place for the inexperienced or the ill equipped. Weather
changes fast, narrow paths coated in black ice twist in steep hairpins
above rushing torrents.

Many of the bodies fished from the rivers are of locals who have lost
their footing and plunged to their deaths. The second possibility is
that the missing were murdered.

In July 2000, two Austrian trekkers were attacked as they camped a few
miles south of Manikaran, outside the village of Malana itself.

One was shot at point-blank range, the other escaped.

A month later, a few miles to the north, an English civil engineer,
his Spanish girlfriend and her 14-year-old son were attacked.

The Englishman survived.

The other two were beaten, hurled into a ravine and died. In December
2001 a skeleton, still in its sleeping bag, was found near Malana and
identified as a missing Israeli pilot, Nadav Mintzer, whose passport
had been offered for sale on the black market in Manali. The police
say that a series of raids and arrests have broken up the gang who
were behind the attacks.

Not everyone is quite as confident.

There is a third possibility, too. That the missing are alive, well,
and do not want to be found.

The Group 4-Securitas investigators started looking for Ian Mogford in
2000, four years after he had disappeared. They put up posters,
circulated leaflets, chased down contacts and leads.

But a curious thing started happening. When they put up posters in the
sleazy Paharganj area of Delhi, where cheap accommodation attracts
thousands of backpackers or 'overstayers', they were all torn down
overnight.

They put them up again, and they were removed once more. No one in the
community of foreigners living in Paharganj wanted to help. No one had
ever seen the man in the posters. Around Christmas 2001, the
investigators say that one of their agents picked up Mogford's trail,
traced his movements for three or four days, and approached him. He
ran.

This autumn, there's a new poster on the walls of the guesthouses,
cafes, trekking agencies and police stations in Kullu. It shows a
young Israeli called Guy Daudi, who disappeared on 1 May after
injuring his leg while trekking with his girlfriend in the Phulgri
Forest above Manali. After an uncomfortable night in the open, the
girl left Daudi and set out to get help. When she returned to the spot
where she had left her boyfriend there was no sign of him. Nor was
there any evidence of a struggle; no bloodstains, no evidence of an
attack by bears or other wild animals, nothing. The police asked the
girl to take a polygraph lie detector test. She passed.

No one has come forward with any information, despite a $5,000
reward.

On the day they dragged Anna Bartlett's body from the Beas River in
Kullu another corpse, waxy from prolonged immersion, was found 15
miles further downstream. It has yet to be identified.

The day after visiting Manikaran we walk up to Malana. It takes about
three hours, along a beautiful path that starts at the bottom of a
gorge, traces an improbable line across the cliffs, and ends on a spur
with a view of ridge after ridge of mountains.

In the sun it is almost bucolic.

The ganja fields start a few hundred metres beneath Malana. The stems
of the plants are broken and snapped.

An old woman sits amid the wreckage of the crop, rubbing what remains
between her palms.

Two weeks ago AP Singh led half the Kullu Valley police force along
this path, laying waste to whatever cannabis they found.

The village itself is small, but every house has a plot of cannabis
behind it. The moment we walk past the first house I am offered
'charas'. Outside the third is a man rubbing a lump of hash the size
of a child's fist. Chander, 20, is sitting with his mates in the sun.
He offers me charas and then tells me how he likes to 'fuck' female
travellers. The difficulty is that Malana is entirely populated by
very high-caste Hindus who believe themselves polluted if they touch
anyone who is less pure. A visitor is not even allowed to touch the
buildings in the centre of the village, let alone the villagers
themselves, for fear of pollution.

To surmount this, Chander cackles, he has to take his conquests down
to the valley before having sex with them. 'They want to marry me, but
I want to try them out first,' he says, fingers his crotch and eyes a
pair of Dutch girls walking past in singlets and beaded hair. 'Don't
go!' Chander calls in mock desperation. The girls miss the joke. 'It
is beautiful and peaceful here, but we have to go on,' one says.
Chander turns to Pablo and looks at his Nikons. 'How much are they
worth?' he asks.

Rashala, who helps run a local guesthouse, is listening and draws me
away. 'Bad people,' he says in Hindi. 'Bad place.

No work here. Destroying the cannabis fields cost a lot of people a
lot of money and they are angry.

Next year they will plant more just further up into the
hills.'

I walk on through the village.

There are one or two dirty children and a handful of decrepit old men
lying on the sun-baked stones outside the temple. They are not friendly.

The atmosphere is eerie.

I ask Rashala where everybody is. 'In the fields,' he says, and rubs
his palms together.

Finally, it is Diwali. In the Evergreen restaurant the lights are low
enough to obscure the menu. In each of the sunken chairs there is a
dreadlocked 'traveller', with requisite chillum, body piercing, fleece
jacket, item of saffron clothing and identically dressed boy-or
girlfriend. Chillout plays softly. Every half hour the single harassed
waiter opens a door to let some air in and allow the clouds of hash
smoke to billow into the night.

Outside, the villagers are not letting the cold, hard rain dampen
their Diwali spirits.

Roman candles spout green and white sparks.

Passers-by are bombarded with the super-charged bangers.

Rockets spatter gouts of red and gold against the dark. The local
tearaways tear away on 250cc motorbikes.

The only shop open is the beer and whisky store.

By 9pm the revellers have almost run out of ammunition and only the
occasional flash illuminates the night. By midnight the only sound is
the river and some muted techno from one of the guesthouses. Then the
returning rain drowns that out, too, and everything is very quiet.