Washington, Sept. 14: On July 28, exactly a week after Antaryami, Tilak Raj and Sukhdev Singh were taken hostage in Iraq, South Block was jolted into the realisation that it could no longer continue to act like Nero.

It had to stop fiddling. Iraq was burning. So would the three Indian truckers unless more was done ?- and done quickly.

The government was forced into action when B.B. Tyagi, the Indian ambassador, told the ministry of external affairs (MEA) that on that day kidnappers had executed a Pakistani engineer and his compatriot driver, freeing an Iraqi who was also taken hostage with the two Pakistanis.

The next day, India issued a travel advisory against its citizens travelling to Iraq. Shyam Saran, who was to take charge as new foreign secretary in four days, has been pressing E. Ahmed, South Block?s junior minister at the centre of the crisis, that India should depute a special envoy to Baghdad to get to grips directly with the problem.

On July 31, Talmiz Ahmad, India?s ambassador in Muscat was sent to Baghdad to take up that role. It made no sense for India to continue to insist that it would not talk to the captors of the three Indians.

When an Indian Airlines plane was hijacked at Christmas time in 1999 and eventually taken to Kandahar, did anyone insist that no talks would be held with the hijackers?

Or, for that matter, would fuel have been refused for a hijacked plane running low on fuel on the ground that it was against policy to talk to terrorists?

These arguments by officials who disagreed with the strategy thus far to free the three Indians carried weight and prodded the government into action.

The execution of the two Pakistanis had an effect similar to the killing of Rupin Katyal, a passenger on board the Indian Airlines plane hijacked in 1999. It suddenly dawned on the crisis management group that history could revisit them after almost five years.

The episode was a reminder of how much Pakistan is a factor in any aspect of Indian diplomacy that it was the execution of two Pakistanis that finally prompted the government to take another look at its strategy in the hostage crisis.

As usual, there was no shortage of conspiracy theorists in South Block who insisted that since the two Pakistanis had been killed, Islamabad would play dirty and do what it can to see that the three Indians do not get out of their ordeal alive.

Once ambassador Ahmad got to Baghdad, secured the services of his trusted translator Zikr-ur-Rahman and Saran assumed charge as foreign secretary, these three men were at the core of the efforts to free the truckers.

The crisis Management group continued to be the public face that dealt with the problem, leaving these three men to do what they thought was best with just one aim in mind: take the three Indians back home alive.

The first thing that Ahmad and Rahman went about doing in Baghdad was to find alternatives to Sheikh Hisham al-Dulami, who had acquired a copyright of sorts in getting hostages freed in Iraq where no one?s writ ran in much of the country. It was good business for the ?good Samaritan? sheikh.

Ahmad and Rahman realised by the time they entered the picture that the entire negotiations between the sheikh and Kuwait Gulf Link (KGL), employers of the truckers, had been reduced to nothing but money.

The sheikh was interested in how much money could be extracted from KGL and the company was merely looking for ways to put this crisis behind them so that they could continue to mint money from transport contracts in Iraq.

Ahmad dug into his extensive contacts in the region, including some in Iraq dating back more than 25 years when he was a second secretary at the Indian embassy in Baghdad and India was a trusted friend of the Iraqis.

They found new Iraqi negotiators who were willing to work for the freedom of the three Indians without any motive of profit. Rahman was tasked to follow up and act on these new tracks of negotiations.

But there was a new problem. KGL was unwilling, at any cost, to give up its contracts in Iraq.

Swashpawan Singh, the Indian ambassador in Kuwait, was given the task of securing a commitment from KGL that it would at least issue a statement of intent to stop trucking to Iraq.

He was also given the brief to negotiate with KGL the amount it would pay as ransom. Neither task was easy. Singh was second secretary in Kabul just before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and handled that country from New Delhi in the tumultuous days after the invasion.

He put to use some of the lessons learned from those years.

Through a combination of threats, inducements and appeals, Singh got KGL to declare an end to its business in Iraq and ensured that half a million dollars was paid to secure freedom for the three Indians.

When the three Indian drivers landed in Delhi and were met by the minister of state for external affairs at the airport, the first thing one of the freed Indians said was that they were thankful to Rahman. Most of those in the receiving party did not grasp what he said. Some interpreted it as a variation of thanking God in Arabic. It was a tribute to the MEA translator who actually negotiated their freedom after a 42-day ordeal even though South Block continues to insist that it never talked to the hostage-takers.