Who Killed Daniel Pearl (21 page)

The police, he tells me, started blocking off the neighborhood around three in the morning.

About twenty ISI agents positioned themselves around the building.

A little before nine, they arrested two Afghans who came out placidly to go to breakfast and they started yelling to alert their comrades who were still on the fourth floor.

At midday, after a fierce gun battle three hours long, with a hundred police reinforcements arriving throughout the morning, we saw a woman, two children, and ten men come out with their hands on their heads, all of them yelling “Allah Akbar” as loud as they could.

“How did we react?” he says with a guffaw. “Were we surprised? Oh, not at all, it wasn't a surprise to anyone. We saw them coming and going, and the lights on day and night. Everyone, starting with the police, knew that Arabs—well, in any case, people who did not speak Urdu—lived here in the neighborhood. There are embassy employees, and students of the
madrasas
. Why should we be suspicious of people who come to study here, friends, who do not make any trouble? How can you expect good Muslims to refuse hospitality to other good, God-fearing Muslims who do no wrong? So this place, like so many others, was known. We saw them going out to do errands every morning. Even the television came to see them two months ago, and the police were aware of it . . . ”

Television? It turns out that he is talking about Yosri Fouda, star of Al-Jazeera, the Arab Bob Woodward, who last summer came to this apartment to interview not only Ramzi bin al-Shibh but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden's right hand man. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: the shining star of the al-Qaida galaxy, a lover of the good life who, they say in Karachi, often travels by helicopter and makes a point of staying in only 5-star hotels, the mastermind of September 11, the inventor, a decade ago in Manila, of the genius idea to turn airplanes into flying bombs, the man to whom one of the kamikazes of the synagogue at Djerba would make his last phone call, just before going into action—in a word, the man whose capture American intelligence services said, six months before his arrest, they would prefer to that of bin Laden if given a choice, because he, and he alone, has “all the pieces of the puzzle.”

Does one have anything to do with the other? Was the Al-Jazeera interview the provocation that set everything in motion? The man from the real estate agency doesn't know. He doesn't seem to think that receiving a leading journalist from Al-Jazeera is any more serious and compromising than going down to the street to buy milk and the morning newspaper, but in the end he doesn't know. Since then, I have verified that the interview, scheduled for 12 September, hadn't yet been broadcast when the Rangers stormed the building. But there were leaks. Al-Jazeera announced it.
The Sunday Times
of London had run some long extracts, as teasers. Fouda himself had talked about it. Here and there, he told how he got the scoop. He spoke about messages he had received in London, secret emissaries, clandestine meetings to plan things, Islamabad, Karachi, pass words, car changes and stealthy exits, a thousand and one details, each more fascinating than the last, leading up to the scoop— and how, finally, one finds oneself face to face in a big, empty apartment with two of the most hunted terrorists on the planet, who tell you, two days running, the real story of September 11, radical Islam's “Holy Tuesday.”

In short, I do not believe the two events are unrelated, nor do I think they are automatically linked. And I can well imagine the Pakistani powers-that-be panicking when they suddenly realized that this damned interview was going to be broadcast in a few hours, and expose the fact that an al-Quaida cell (and what a cell!) was functioning with impunity in the heart of Karachi and known openly to the press—and deciding to take the initiative by staging a spectacular operation on the eve of the broadcast.

Fouda said it all, after his scoop: “If, as a journalist, I am able to reach these people, then why the devil don't the Pakistanis do so?”

But there are other strange details about this affair.

I hang around the Igloo ice cream shop and the real estate agency for another hour or two. I talk a while longer to the real estate agent, who is still fascinated by what's happened. I listen and observe, and I realize that there are a few more peculiarities that reinforce my feeling of unease and that fail to corroborate the ministry's communiqué about its grand antiterrorist operation, heroic and valiant and ultimately dangerous, that led to the pitched battle.

The fact, for example, that from what I can see, there seemed to be, coming from the fourth floor, little fire in return: a few bullet holes in the wall of the ice cream store, and signs of one grenade, maybe two, that seem to have exploded where the Hindus are now busy working. That's not much for the ferocious battle the police and the Rangers supposedly encountered.

Seeming to confirm this observation is the fact that, when the Rangers broke into the apartment, they found prayer books, documents, radios, computer equipment, blank computer discs, everything necessary for forging fake passports, and gigantic
Allah Akbar
s written on the walls in blood. But instead of the expected weapons cache, instead of the arsenal described in this morning's edition of
Dawn
: one Kalashnikov. Only one. The man from the real estate agency is adamant. He spoke with the police, and then he spoke with the people responsible for putting the police seals on the building, and he can certify that they found, in all, one Kalashnikov—not much for the den of the Devil.

Mohammed—the fearsome and mysterious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He was the one they were looking for, the big fish. I repeat that the entire FBI believed that if they could only interrogate one person from bin Laden's inner circle, or only put away one al-Qaida leader, including bin Laden himself, it would be Mohammed. But he's not there on that day. Usually, he was there, the real estate agency employee told me, he was there every evening, like the others, and we'd see him come and go, because it was his place. But, as if by chance, he is the only one who did not come home the previous night—and so he escaped. Was that really by chance? Indiscretion? A leak?

The children. Among those arrested were two children. But I discover— it's in the papers—first of all, that they are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's children. Secondly, it's obvious the police know this because General Moinuddin Haider, Minister of the Interior, announced it to the press right after the operation, adding, in a burst of lyricism: “We are holding them. We are not turning them over to anyone. And we will get Khalid.” And thirdly, today's news—the police released the children yesterday morning, supposedly for “humanitarian reasons,” thereby giving up their only apparent means of tracking down the architect of September 11.

The date. The operation takes place on the date of September 11. The eve of the Al-Jazeera broadcast of an interview that's no longer a secret and is obviously going to make a huge splash. But really, one cannot help but think that it is also
the
September 11, and that to launch such an operation against the brains behind the September 11 attacks on the very anniversary of those attacks is something of a miraculous coincidence. If they had chosen this date, if they had known that an al-Qaida cell was there, if they had decided to wait before revealing it, and dismantling it, until this symbolically and politically significant and media-tailored day, they could not have done better. It was as though the Pakistani authorities, once again, had arranged and calculated everything. As though they wanted to send a very clear, strong message to their American ally. Happy Birthday, Mr. President! What do you think of this thoughtful and subtly planned anniversary present?

And then finally, the essential, not only the most bizarre, but the most incredible and, for me, the most dramatic turn of events that will relaunch my entire investigation: among the “Yemenis” arrested (whether or not they have been turned over to the Americans I have been unable to determine), among the “Arabs” who walked out in single file shouting “Allah Akbar” (in reality, only eight Yemenis, since there was an Egyptian and a Saudi), among these ten “terrorists” (a man from the electricity company is talking now, as the ice cream seller watches and the real estate agent nods his head solemnly) “was the American journalist's assassin,” the real one, the one who held the knife.

I ask him to say that over again.

What journalist? I ask.

I press him: “You're talking about the
Wall Street Journal
reporter, the man whose throat was slit at Gulzar e-Hijri, Daniel Pearl?”

Yes, that's who he's talking about.

He seems to be saying, I don't see what you're getting so excited about. Other people in this world have had their throats slit! Other journalists have died. Do they have to be Americans for the West to take an interest? Does he have to be a Jew to suddenly become more important than thousands of Kashmiris, of Palestinians, who die every day from Indian or Israeli bullets? A double standard . . . You are hopeless . . .

He takes a key out from under the counter, opens a cupboard behind him and takes out a photo of a charred little body, hunched over and curled up, lying in a green, green field. “My cousin, in Kashmir, the war against the Indians. Did the Zionist newspapers print this photo of my cousin?”

In any case, the fact of the assassin's presence is there.

It is, indeed, what these men are talking about.

I've been here for three days. Every day I read the Pakistani press and listen to the radio and watch the television, but nowhere and at no time have I heard this story mentioned. I had to come and hang out here, between an ice cream shop and a real estate agency, to learn this astounding piece of news.

If they are telling the truth, it means that: 1. for the past week the authorities have had in custody the man who held the knife that killed Daniel Pearl; 2. rather than boasting about it, as one might expect, rather than crowing from the rooftops the great news of a political victory, as well as a victory for the police, they say nothing about it—nothing spectacular, a news story like any other, no reason to put it on the front page; 3. the man, in any case, lived here for at least a month, if not two months, in this neighborhood infested with former military men and crawling with police—this mysterious criminal, this killer the police scoured the country to find, was quietly going about his business in one of the residential quarters of the city.

Three pieces of information in one.

Three odd facts that, to put it mildly, leave me perplexed.

That's enough to make me want to rethink the whole affair, but this time, starting from the other end—that of Omar's accomplices, those other actors in the drama who were as responsible as he was for bringing this crime to its dénouement and who, until now, I have neglected.

CHAPTER 2
PRESS REVIEW

The first thing I do, as soon as Abdul arrives, is to hurry to the nearest library's reference room.

No matter which one.

No matter, either, the real name of Abdul, the old, former journalist converted to rights-of-man advocate whom I picked up at the train station early in the morning and who, from now on, is my companion. Ah yes, the old former journalist . . . thirty-two years have passed since the time of our red India . . . thirty-two years since our good-byes on the last line of the front, at the very end of the Indo-Pakistani war—the trucks of Yahya Khan's army took him back to Pakistan, and I rode on to Dacca in those of the Indian army. I left a Maoist who had given me the opportunity to encounter the loony Indian pro-Chinese known as “naxalists.” What remains of that young man, the joyous internationalist, impassioned and ingenuous, whose determination to question himself and his side became a ruling principal, leading to a lasting commitment to those “enemies of the country,” those “traitors,” the oppressed Bengalis? A voice, a flicker of regret in his eyes, a few familiar gestures, and beyond that, the old former journalist who, as he warned me, has lost his hair . . .

What's important now is that we shut ourselves up in this room panelled in wood like a terribly British club, with polished woodwork, threadbare carpet, and a long, oval table in the center.

Without revealing what we are actually looking for, but using the pretext of a study of sanitation in Pakistan's northern provinces, we have them haul out all the major newspapers from the last week, and then, week by week, all the way back until mid-May. English for me, Urdu for him.

And, gradually, painstakingly, we go over everything, down to the local news and the human-interest stories, looking for the unnoticed wire service dispatch, or the unsigned paragraph, giggling like children at the outlandish story about a fight between two fake doctors in Sadiq Town, near Quetta, or exclaiming over an absurd photo. We stop, tears in our eyes, and remember a similar scene thirty years ago in the library of
The
Times of India
in Calcutta, where we used to go, like modern Fabrices at Waterloo, to look at the map and trace the battles we had watched but of which we understood very little. It brought to mind as well the paragons of those days, Jean Vincent, and Bernard Ullman, and Lucien Bodard, a mountain of a man, a little shy, standing in his underwear, in the hotel room at the Intercontinental at Calcutta, providing a continuous spectacle with his perpetual speeches and his magnificent volubility . . . We start from the top, taking into account every small detail: a proven method that has never failed me in all the stories I have covered over the past thirty years, including and especially in countries where the press cannot be considered entirely free. I've never encountered an enigma, or any extreme confusion, that attentive, critical reading of local newspapers, provided it is timely, failed to clarify to some degree . . .