Pakistan Trip Yields Schelly No Clues She Had Hoped To Ask Freed Cleric For Information On Missing Husband

Jane Schelly returned to teaching at Arlington Elementary this week after spending much of January in Pakistan seeking information about her missing husband.

Schelly met with the father of a Muslim cleric who had been traded for the hostages on a hijacked Indian Airlines jet, and joined congressional delegations that were visiting with Pakistani leaders.

She received no information about the fate of her husband, Donald Hutchings, who was kidnapped in 1995 while the two were traveling in Kashmir. But she remains hopeful.

“The visit could pay off two or three months down the road,” she said. The most likely type of assistance would be information from an anonymous source that investigators could check.

Schelly originally planned to issue a public appeal for information about Hutchings and his fellow captives to Masood Azhar, the previously jailed cleric who is a leading spokesman for separating Kashmir from India. Schelly met with Azhar in 1996, and at that time he wrote a letter calling for other militants to provide any information they had about the hostages.

But after Azhar was released from prison in exchange for 155 hostages on the hijacked jetliner, he started advocating a jihad, or holy war, against India and the United States to free Kashmir. Schelly decided against calling for a public meeting with Azhar, who is advocating a jihad at mosques around Pakistan.

“I thought a meeting would back him into a corner,” she said. Instead, she spoke with Azhar’s father, whom she also met in 1996, and asked him to pass along an appeal for help.

“He said he would pass along this message, and do what he could to help,” she said. “We never know how all these things work.”

While she was in Pakistan, one potential lead on the fate of the hostages evaporated. Lab tests proved conclusively that bones exhumed near a Kashmiri village were not those of one of the captured tourists, she said.

Published reports earlier this year indicated that new DNA evidence showed the bones had been identified as belonging to one of the hostages. But further tests showed the skeleton was too short and the teeth didn’t match dental records for hostage Paul Wells, Schelly said.

Hutchings, German Dirk Hastert and Britons Wells and Keith Mangan were kidnapped in July 1995 by a previously unknown military group. They may have been killed in late 1995 after the group lost a gunbattle with the Indian army, but no one has been able to say for sure they are dead, or where they were buried.