Three days before the aircraft burned, something else had happened at Paro. Fifteen civilian workers were building a *puskesmas*, a small community health clinic, for the district of Paro in Nduga Regency. The Free Papua Movement, OPM, confronted them. Some of the workers were not carrying national identity cards, and OPM fighters under the local commander Egianus Kogoya accused them of being Indonesian spies. The clinic workers were threatened; their presence in the valley became the catalyst. When the Susi Air Pilatus landed on the morning of 7 February with its pilot and five Indonesian passengers - all of them indigenous Nduga people, including an infant named Wetina W - it flew into the middle of an escalating standoff. The OPM took Mehrtens, the Indonesian passengers, and the clinic workers captive.

Within days, the OPM released the five Papuan passengers on the grounds that they were indigenous. The clinic workers were evacuated by Indonesian police helicopter, and then the Ministry of Transportation closed Paro's airport, the burned fuselage still blocking its runway. Mehrtens, the New Zealander, remained. Egianus Kogoya's demand was simple and impossible: Indonesia must recognize West Papuan independence. Otherwise, he said, the pilot would be killed. Kopassus - Indonesia's special forces - deployed two battalions of its Unit 81 counter-terrorism force to Timika. Thousands of civilians were evacuated from villages across Nduga, Lanny Jaya, and Puncak regencies in an effort to deny Kogoya's group community support. The highlands became a slow-moving military operation, fought in cloud forest at 2,000 meters.

Months passed. Videos appeared periodically - Mehrtens surrounded by armed men, sometimes wearing restraints at his neck and wrists, reading statements urging foreign pilots to stop flying into Papua and asking the Indonesian military to stop bombing the area. Damien Kingsbury, an Australian professor with long ties to West Papuan groups, was authorized by the TPNPB rebels to serve as their intermediary with New Zealand; that channel closed in May 2023 when Wellington preferred a different route. The Indonesian police offered 5 billion rupiah - about US$320,000 - as ransom in July; Kogoya refused to accept money from the Indonesian state. Throughout, soldiers and fighters died in ambushes and counter-ambushes across Nduga. A particularly grim incident in April 2024 saw rebels attack 36 TNI soldiers near Mugi-Mam, killing at least six in a single engagement; the Wikipedia record also names an eight-year-old boy killed by Kogoya's group in March 2023 after his father, a local village head, refused to supply the fighters with food.

On 21 September 2024, after nineteen months, Phillip Mehrtens walked out of the highlands. The release followed quiet, prolonged negotiations involving the TPNPB, Indonesian authorities, and New Zealand government agencies. The rebels had issued conditions days before - open media access, a pause in military operations, permission for Mehrtens to speak freely about his time in captivity - and these conditions were broadly honored. Mehrtens was flown to Timika for health checks and a psychological examination, spoke by phone to his family, and was then flown to Jakarta in an Indonesian Air Force plane. An Indonesian Army lieutenant general confirmed that he was in good health. He had been held longer than any hostage in the comparable 1996 Mapenduma crisis, and longer than most foreign captives held by any insurgent group anywhere in the world in recent memory.

Nduga is not an easy country to operate in, and that is the point. The region sits in the Maoke range, where ridges rise above 3,000 meters and weather closes in by midday. Susi Air's Pilatus PC-6 is the workhorse of these valleys because it is almost the only aircraft that can land on their short, sloped strips - and because there are no roads. The economy depends on air service; so does any military operation. For the TPNPB, the terrain offers the same protection it has offered rebels for decades: somewhere to hide a hostage, somewhere to retreat, somewhere the state's power runs out. The underlying conflict - over sovereignty, over what Indonesia calls Papua and what its opponents call West Papua - has no resolution in sight. Pilots still fly into these valleys. Another crisis, sooner or later, seems likely.