Who Killed Daniel Pearl (17 page)

There is the famous photo, taken around 2000–2001 in Lahore, where he is dressed entirely in white and wears red flowers, the color of jam, around his neck. He is an adult now. He is arrogant. Flamboyant. He has massive shoulders and a sculpted torso. He wears the medium-long beard of the Taliban and a large, white turban, wound around his head several times. I suppose the photo must have been taken at about the time he returned from India, at one of those receptions he wouldn't miss for the world, where he rubbed elbows, it is said, with the Punjabi elite of the city—“May I introduce Omar, a man of principles and convictions . . . our hero, our star, the man who expresses our feelings and wears our colors . . . the Indians tortured him, he withstood it.” He looks happy. There is something peaceful, fulfilled, in his expression. It's a three-quarter view, but you can see his man-eating smile, and behind his tinted glasses, the look of a watchful wildcat. To me, this photo gives him a false resemblance— less a few pounds—to Masood Azhar, his mentor and guru, the man who has impressed him more than anyone in the world and with whom he is now in competition.

There is a picture of him, taken two years later in front of the prisonat Hyderabad, during his trial, maybe on the day he received the death sentence. His head is bare this time. He wears a shirt. His beard is shorter. He is surrounded by a crowd of policemen in their navy blue caps and Rangers in black berets. In the foreground is a raised hand, but it's impossible to tell if it is there to strike someone, or to stop someone or something. One can guess that, beyond the frame, there was a good deal of agitation, probably the reason for this strong military presence. In fact, everyone seems nervous. Everyone is anticipating an incident, perhaps even a riot. But he, Omar, is calm. His eyes are lowered. He is facing the camera, his torso leaning slightly backward, as though the pressures of the crowd, the cameras, the police, disgusted him a bit or irritated him. And in this slight movement of recoil, the refusal to look directly into the camera while everyone is swarming around him, is the black insolence that reminds me of the days of his arm wrestling tournaments in London.

There's another photo taken then, but more cropped, framing only his face which he has raised to the light now. His head is thrown back as if he were listening to a distant sound or taking a deep breath of the cool air. The face is pale and stony, with a slightly mocking expression, like the remains of a smile. (Did the photographer catch him at the end of one of those diabolical laughs that made the blood of his friends in London and that of his hostages in New Delhi turn to ice?) This time we see his eyes. And in those eyes we feel an utter contempt for everything that has just happened—the sorrow of Pearl's loved ones, the Court's severity, its legalism, hearing himself condemned to death by hanging and knowing, or feigning to know, that no one believes it and it's all a vast sham, and now all this fuss around him and for him . . . The truth is, one senses in this photo that he doesn't believe what is happening to him. He seems to be saying to himself, “What does it matter, after all? Why are all these people getting so excited? I know that within a year, maybe two, I'll be out of this grotesque hell. And in the meantime, I will have become a great, a very great, jihadist, the equal of Masood Azhar, my old patron, may the Devil take him. Now I'm the one who will be the symbol of the movement . . . ”

And another shot from the same day, in fact, the same situation, the same Rangers surrounding him, his hands bound across his stomach— except that now, it's all over. He is ready to get into the blue armored vehicle waiting for him. He seems sober. Perhaps the crowd around him has dispersed. Perhaps he has realized the enormity of his situation. And in his face, there is suddenly, curiously, something lost and defeated. The eyes seem dazzled. The smile is prudent, a little silly. He must be trembling a bit, shivering. I even get the impression I can see a drop of sweat standing out on his forehead. The arrogant man, the hero, the successor of Masood Azhar who envisioned himself entering the pantheon of combatants in his lifetime, has become again a sort of a debutant—with something of the weakness, the softness, the childish indecisiveness in his features that was there in the very first photos dating from the time when he was only a child looking for his identity and destiny.

The mobility of his face, the malleability of his expressions, this incredible capacity, in photos taken in the same period and even, as here, almost at the same instant, to change expressions and become, suddenly, another person—they said the same of Carlos the Jackal, it has been said of bin Laden. Do they all have this diabolical aptitude to be, truly, several people—this name, and these faces that are legion?

The photos missing are those of the interim period: Bosnia, the Afghan and Pakistani training camps, India, the hostage takings, prison. Do they exist? Are there images of that Omar, and if so, where?

Actually, I do have one extraordinary photo, one that is, I think, unpublished. He is lying bare-chested on a hospital bed, no doubt at the hospital in Ghaziabad, in India, where he was cared for in 1994 after the assault of the police to liberate the hostages. An I.V. feed is visible at his left. His right arm is bent and his hand is touching his forehead. He is very pale. His beard is very black. His features are emaciated. He looks almost as if he were posing in imitation of the famous photo by Freddy Alborta of the dead Ché Guevara. The annoying thing is that it's the only such photo. And it's taken from too far away to say much more about it. So, for that period, I had to rely almost entirely on the oral testimony of Peter Gee, the Englishman who was Omar's cellmate in New Delhi for over a year and who is thus one of the people in the world who knows him best.

The shady Gee, who was in prison for trafficking in cannabis, was released in March 2000, three months after Omar. He did not stay in England. He went to live in Spain, in Centenera, a secluded village in the heart of the mountains, between Huesca and Barbastro, without electricity, without phone, a general delivery address, and the e-mail address of a friend he checks in with once or twice a month. A real treasure hunt to track him down. I met him for dinner in a hotel in San Sebastian where I went for something else entirely (to preside over a meeting of solidarity with the victims of E.T.A. Basque terrorism with Fernando Savater and his friends of “Ya Basta”).

He looks a worn-out thirty, short, blond hair, with a touch of the burned-out hippie who lives on music, hash, yoga, and never sees the papers or the television, who takes his doses of the world with an eyedropper. An old Dutch companion, even further gone than he, drove him here and views him much as one views stars or great men because of his time in India and his ties to a celebrated terrorist. Why did Gee come? Why did he accept, not just to talk to me, but to drive all this way? Friendship, he says, Omar was a friend. He liked his honesty, his idealism, his gaiety. And just because Omar's in deep shit he's not going to change his opinion. If he popped up here, at the next table, he'd just say to him, “Hey, man, how you doing? Sit down, let's talk!” Other reasons for talking to me? I don't know, nor am I looking to know. I'm too happy for the windfall of his appearance to waste my time in conjectures and not take advantage of this miraculous opportunity to raise some questions I've been dying to ask.

The Omar he remembers is a pious man, truly pious, who believes in the immortality of the soul and the existence of paradise “like he believes an egg is an egg and two plus two make four.”

He's a fundamentalist, without a doubt. For a whole year, Gee can't remember having seen him read anything other than the Koran, or commentaries on the Koran. “I tried Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe
on him, or Dostoyevski, but he couldn't understand how they could be of any use to him.”

That said, he was open. He wasn't the kind to think there were only Muslims in this world. Once, for example, two non-Muslim Nigerians had been punished because tobacco was found in their cell. In such cases, the practice was to attach them to a bar and have their fellow inmates come by and whip them with a bamboo switch. Well, Omar refused to do it and started a hunger strike in solidarity with the Nigerians. OK, so it didn't work. People reported sick so they could go to the infirmary and eat. But it gives you an idea of the state of mind of Omar, of his humanism.

Gee remembers his charisma as well. The power he had over others. Was it his voice? His unblinking, unwavering stare? His high intelligence? The fact that he had been to Bosnia, Afghanistan? His exploits? In any case, he reigned. He bewitched people. He lived—he was—like a sort of Don, the godfather of all the Pakistanis and Bengalis in the prison. Sometimes it even bothered him. He didn't approve of behaving like a mafia chief. He'd say, out loud, “Beware the intoxication of power! The important thing is ideas, not power! Ideas!”

Was he violent? Does Gee remember conversations, scenes, where he sensed this taste for violence that led Omar to assassinate Pearl or, before that, to threaten his previous hostages—Nuss, Croston, Partridge and Rideout—with decapitation? Peter Gee hesitates. He realizes that his friend's skin could be at stake in his answers. On the one hand, he admits, there were signs. The fact that Omar struck the director of the prison at Meerut, in Uttar Pradesh, where he served the first part of his sentence. Or the day in the Tihar jail, where he had organised a boycott of the
Jai
Hind
—the Indian patriotic prayer all the inmates, Muslims included, were obliged to recite every morning—when, faced with the administration's reprisals, he spoke of killing one of the head guards. But on the other hand no, signs are just signs, not acts, and he thinks deep down, Omar was basically good and pacifistic. He can't believe he could have killed Daniel Pearl. And as for the other affair, the threats towards the hostages in New Delhi, he has only one thing to tell me: “At the time when we thought I was getting out of prison before him, he gave me the address of those people and asked me to go see them, to tell them for him that he regretted his duplicity, that he was sorry he had lied to trap them. Isn't that proof of his goodness?”

Women. This is a mystery to me, Omar and women—does Gee have any ideas? Hypotheses? Did they ever talk about women, during their long conversations in the cell? It's simple, Gee said. It's his obsession with purity. He puts them up too high on a pedestal. And so he didn't dare. He was twenty-five at the time, and deep down, Gee's not certain Omar had ever made love with a woman, or even seen a woman nude.

“I remember a conversation,” he says. “We were in the prison refectory and we were talking about what it is to be courageous. His theory was that real courage isn't necessarily risking death, because all you need is to be a believer like him, and then it no longer holds any fear and there's no merit in facing it. Facing a woman, on the other hand—now that's true courage. To walk up to the girl he found attractive at the London School and, rather than talking through go-betweens, ask her out for a coffee— it's something he had never done, and he suddenly regretted it.”

Islamism and women, this depth of panic and terror, this fear and, sometimes, this dizziness in front of the feminine sex I've always thought was the real foundation of the fundamentalist urge. Is Omar proof?

Omar's secret, Gee tells me, is lack of belonging or, the same thing, the fervent desire to belong. A double culture. Pakistan in England. England in Pakistan. It was Omar's idea to leave the Forest School in 1998 and go to Lahore. What? No, you say? You found out that it was his parents' decision, and it's when Crystal Chemical Factories Ltd. stopped that they returned to London? All right, maybe. After all, you're the one who's done the investigating. All I know is that, it didn't work that way either. He realized that not belonging works both ways and that he wasn't any more at home at Aitchison than he was at the Forest School. So, in your opinion, when you get to that point, when you're split this way, what do you do? What solution is left you? The loony Dutch friend, who has been drawing circles and saying nothing since the beginning of our talk, suddenly and vigorously agrees. More than ever, he admires his friend Peter Gee.

I remember what one of the New Delhi hostages, Rhys Patridge, said a few weeks ago. He recalled Omar's terrible outbursts of verbal violence against the Jews. He remembered a thorough and radical hatred for England. Was this a recent hatred, or an old one? Dating from his terrorist period, or before? The happy student, the polite child, was he keeping it a secret, waiting for his time to come?

“I have a theory,” Patridge told me. “I thought about these famous arm wrestling tournaments, and I have a theory. Deep down inside, he hated them. He had only contempt for those fat Englishmen bursting with beer, tattooed, obscene, propping up the bar. Just that—he learned to know them and to hate them. He was like a double agent in contact with the enemy. That's what arm wrestling did for him.”

A phallic challenge then—yes. Homoerotic jousting in an atmosphere seeking annihilation of the
other
—who, of the two of us, has the biggest arm? Partridge vs. Gee—the thesis of the grand phallic merry-go-round, homosexual and mimetic, as opposed to the thesis of the outsider.

Who is Omar, really?

Are there two Omars? A wolf and a lamb in the same cage? The perfect Englishman and the ultimate enemy?

Are there more than two—protagonists of even more contradictory scenarios? A truly diabolical Omar?

Or is there only one Omar; but one who must have always been cheating and who, already in London, acted like a good boy but nonetheless had a sinister double, a shadow, that was about to swallow him?