Captivity in Kashmir Nears 5 Months : India: American, three others are still in hands of pro-independence militants. Guerrillas scale back demand for release of separatist cohorts.

The first heavy snows of winter this week blanketed the peaks and vales of Kashmir, where somewhere in a remote hide-out, a 42-year-old psychologist from Washington state is the prisoner of Islamic extremists who have threatened to kill him.

For nearly five months, Donald Hutchings, the victim of a vacation turned nightmare, has been an unwilling, and perhaps very sick, pawn in the hands of a shadowy armed group, Al Faran.

With three other abducted foreign tourists--two Britons and a German--the strapping, gray-bearded resident of Spokane has been herded from isolated place to place as Al Faran’s militants, said by Indian officials to vary in number between 20 and 50, have successfully eluded capture by army and paramilitary units.

In August, a fifth tourist held by Al Faran, Hans Christian Ostro, 27, of Norway, was found beheaded.

“I do not know today I will die or tomorrow I will die,” Hutchings said in a gloomy tape recording released by Al Faran in mid-July. “I do not know what will happen. I appeal to the American government and the Indian government for help.”

The psychologist was abducted July 4 while on a trekking holiday with his wife in the Himalayas of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s northernmost state and home to a 6-year-old separatist insurgency. The captors at first demanded the release of 21 fighters for Kashmiri independence who are languishing in Indian jails.

Last week, however, press reports that Indian officials privately confirmed said the demand has been scaled back to the release of four leading imprisoned separatists, including Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani national who is secretary general of the well-known and powerful militant Islamic group Harkat-ul-Ansar.

At last word, Al Faran and its prisoners were believed to be in the lower altitudes of Kashmir’s Anantnag district, about 50 miles south of the state’s summer capital of Srinagar and north of the sparkling peaks of the Pir Panjal Range.

Srinagar and the area received the first heavy snows of the season on Wednesday morning, with falls of up to four feet reported, and the 200-mile-long highway that is the only road link between the Kashmir Valley and the rest of India had to be closed to vehicles.

Without naming which hostage it meant, Al Faran claimed earlier last month that one of its captives was so sick he was near death. Indian newspapers identified Hutchings as the one who is ailing, but Jammu and Kashmir state information adviser I. Ramamohan Rao on Wednesday dismissed such talk as speculation.

“As they move, he [Hutchings] has been spotted limping, and the deduction has been that he suffered frostbitten feet while they were at high altitudes,” Rao said in New Delhi.

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In August, Al Faran released two color photographs and a tape that claimed that Hutchings had been wounded during a shootout with Indian troops near Pahalgam, but the government flatly denies that any such clash took place.

Officials in Srinagar have said that Al Faran has sought medical care at least twice for its prisoners, who are known to have suffered stomach and eye ailments during their ordeal.

On Wednesday, an Indian official told Reuters news agency that the abductors have been trying to get more medical aid for the past few days and that Hutchings and one of the Britons, Paul Wells, 23, of London, were said to be seriously ill. But Rao said Al Faran’s latest request was a “poker play” designed to step up the pressure on India to give in to the abductors.

India’s government, which has been battling the rebellion in Kashmir since 1989, has ruled out granting the kidnapers’ demands, saying that to do so would only encourage more abductions. A rescue attempt would be too risky, officials say.