THE awful limbo into which the family and friends of Blackburn student hostage Paul Wells were plunged, when he and three other westerners were captured by separatist guerrillas in Kashmir, today extends to two long years.

The agony of uncertainty and anxiety that they have to endure is unimaginable.

But what beggars belief and provokes every emotion from anger to bewilderment is the sheer inhumanity of it all.

How can anyone subject another to the ordeal that Paul Wells and his fellow captives have undergone?

How can anyone put their families through the mental torture they have suffered?

Of not knowing whether their loved ones are dead or alive?

And how can anyone deliberately stretch that misery to two whole years and let it continue?

Above all, how can they do this for such futile ends? Not one jot of advantage has been gained for the political cause of which all these innocents are victims. Only the opposite has been achieved.

We are unable to appeal directly to Paul's captors to at least realise this and relent for, surely, all that can otherwise sustain their heartless silence, now that two wasted years have elapsed, is pitiless spite.

But today, as we ask readers to plead with the authorities in India, Pakistan and at our own Foreign Office to help bring this ordeal to an end, that message must be conveyed to the remote mountains and valleys of Kashmir - that the time has come for this dreadful limbo to cease.

If Paul and his colleagues are dead, his captors must now tell the truth.

If they are alive, they must realise that no gain lies in keeping them hostage any more.

If they cannot do either out of compassion - and what base creatures they are if that is so - then at least let them do so out of sanity.

Two years is too long for either cruelty or a wasted cause.

We hope and pray that reason may now prevail.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.