Status Anxiety

5 July 2008

Sean left strict orders: if he was kidnapped, I was to be kept away from the region

Being muzzled is a very frustrating experience for a journalist. When the story broke last week that Sean Langan had been kidnapped in a remote region of Pakistan — he was released on 21 June after a long and tortuous negotiation — I got a stream of email messages from mutual friends saying, ‘Did you know about this?’ I wanted to respond by saying, ‘Of course I f***ing did.’ For the three months of Sean’s incarceration I had barely been able to think of anything else.

On reflection, though, it was a perfectly reasonable question. If I had known about it, why hadn’t I told them? More importantly, why hadn’t I written about it? Surely, if your best friend is kidnapped, the first thing you do is kick up an almighty stink in the media in the hope of putting pressure on the powers that be to secure his release?

Sean, too, was thinking this. Shortly after he was kidnapped, one of his captors gave him a transistor radio and he had it permanently tuned to the World Service, hoping to hear news of his own abduction. After six weeks had passed, and he still hadn’t heard his name mentioned, he began to despair. If his absence had gone completely unnoticed, he reasoned, his Muslim kidnappers would feel much less inhibited about cutting his head off.

In fact, his absence had not gone unnoticed. He was in the region to make a documentary about the Taleban and he had put a security protocol in place whereby he would telephone someone at Renegade Pictures, the independent production company he was working for, at regular intervals. After two weeks had elapsed and he still hadn’t been in contact, the company’s chief executive, Alan Hayling, employed local journalists in Afghanistan to track him down. As the days passed, it became increasingly clear that something had ‘gone wrong’ — no one dared use the word ‘kidnapped’ in case saying it out loud would make it more likely to be true. Eventually, one of Sean’s captors telephoned the son of his interpreter, who was imprisoned alongside him, to ask why no one had been in touch to inquire about his father’s whereabouts. It was a bizarre phone call -— should we have looked under ‘Kidnappers’ in the Islamabad Yellow Pages? — but it confirmed our worst fears.

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