Who Killed Daniel Pearl (22 page)

First, the organization chart of the crime.

Up until now, I haven't given it much thought.

So I profit from this plunge into the archives, because it enables me to clearly identify the different cells among which Omar Sheikh divvied up the tasks of his crime.

The first cell's assignment was to arouse the journalist's professional curiosity and, on the pretext of leading him to Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, to persuade him to come to the Village Garden. That was Omar, of course. But it was also Arif, alias Syed Hashim Qadeer, director of a small madrasa in Ahmadpur East, already wanted for his alleged role in the murder of at least seven people in the Pakistani Punjab and known to have close ties to Harkat ul-Mujahideen. It was Arif whom Pearl initially contacted; according to Pearl's fixer in Islamabad, Arif was to lead him to Gilani, and he was also the one responsible for the liaison with Omar since he organised the meeting at the Hotel Akbar. The third member of this contact cell is Hyder, alias Imtiaz Siddiqui, a.k.a. Amjad Hussain Farooqi, real name: Mansur Hasnain, a veteran of the Afghan wars and a member of Harkat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, the other extremist group that, under a hail of American bombs and in armed combat against the Northern Alliance, paid the heaviest tribute of solidarity with the Taliban. In some wire stories from February, I read that, a year ago, using the pseudonym of Sunny Ahmed Qazi, he was the organizer of the plane hijacking of Kandahar. (“I owe him my life,” Omar reportedly said after he was freed.) I read as well that he is the one Omar asked to make the last two phone calls to Danny on the afternoon of the 23 January to confirm the date at the Village Garden. He'll come up again in a moment in my research on cell number 3. But one of Hyder's neighbors told investigators he saw him returning to his village one day at the beginning of January, long before the kidnapping, accompanied by an Arab and a Pakistani who resembled Omar, which indicates that he was already in this first cell and a very early participant in the plot.

Second cell. This is the cell that helped Omar address the series of emails to Pearl to inspire his confidence and lure him into the trap. This is also the cell that scanned the photos of the journalist in chains, and sent them, along with the communiqués claiming credit for the kidnapping, to the major national and international news agencies—the cell in charge of exterior relations. Three men, again. Three men to send two series of e-mails from one or two of the city's cyber cafés: Adil Mohammad Sheikh, policeman, member of an elite anti-terrorist unit and probably leader of the group; his cousins, Salman Saquib and Fahad Nasim, specialists—especially Fahad—in computer science. All three were veterans of the Afghanistan war and linked to Jaish e-Mohammed, the “Army of the Prophet”—the group that was outlawed by the Paistani government just days before the kidnapping on January 12. And Pearl's decapitation, according to the police, bears the group's signature. In 1999, the founders of the group killed poor Ripen Katyal in the same way, bleeding him like a pig in front of his fellow passengers in the forward cabin on the Indian Airlines plane that was hijacked to buy the liberation of Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar. They're “brave,” Omar said during their common trial, alluding to Salman Saquib's scar-covered body. They are “true fighters of Islam,” he insisted: I knew them in the field, and, in lending their competence to the army of redemption I had raised, they accomplished a deed that pleased Allah.

Third cell. The largest. The one at the rendezvous at the Village Garden, that stayed with Danny right up until his execution. Seven men, eight if you count Hussain Farooqi, alias Mansur, who, apart from his role in cell number 1, was asked to stay with the other jailers and Danny for the duration of his captivity. There is Akram Lahori, the
salar,
or supreme commander, of Lashkar I-Janghvi, the fanatic Sunni group whose original leader, Riaz Basra, died in the first days of 2002, in circumstances that remain unclear. And Asif Ramzi, Lahori's right hand man and the head of the Qari Hye, a subfaction of Lashkar, that takes care of Arab fighters who came for the Afghanistan jihad and ended up in Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban. And Naeem Bukhari, a.k.a. Atta ur-Rehman, another one of the directors of Lashkar and the real boss in the Karachi area. He was at the Village Garden, too. He was the one on the moped leading the car with Danny in it, and the one who forced Danny to read the text for the video. Since Lahori, technically his superior, came and went from Gulzar e-Hijri, Bukhari took over as acting head of the operation, along with Hyder. And Fazal Karim, who fought with Bukhari in Kashmir and in Afghanistan and, during the kidnapping, chauffeur for Saud Memon, the proprietor of the house and the land. He also stayed until the very end and, in fact, he may be the only witness besides the executioners to the execution. Interrogated following his arrest in mid-May, he said in his deposition to the police, “I would go out and do it again; he was a Jew, an American; I feel great to be a part of the revenge against America.” And Faisal, alias Zobair Chishti, Lahori's and Bukhari's enforcer, involved under their aegis in the most murderous operations of Lashkar i-Janghvi and brought into the plot at the last minute as a sort of strong man, in charge of close surveillance of the victim (the escape attempt by the window of the toilet, shot in the shins with the pistol, etc.). And then there are two more of whom I know nothing, except their first or last names: Mussadiq, a caretaker; and Abdul Samat, a student or former student suspected as one of the participant in the suicide bombing against the French engineers at the Sheraton on 8 May 2002, who seems, for the time being, to have been a sort of assistant to Hyder in charge of supervision of the cell.

And then, finally, the fourth cell. The actual killers. Those who, arriving at the last moment, held the knife and filmed the throat-slitting. Perhaps, as well, whoever called them on this last day with the order to carry out the execution and thus took responsibility for the dénouement. Of him I know little, except, if he exists, his name, Saud Memon, and the fact that he is a rich and powerful Karachi businessman, landlord of the house in Gulzar e-Hijri. (I say “if he exists,” because, according to another hypotheses, nobody made the call from inside the compound: rather, on the morning of the 30th, someone called from outside, announcing the arrival of the three killers and giving orders to allow them to “operate as they wish.”) As for the killers, if they exist as well, I read that they are “Arabs” or “Yemenis” or “Yemeni-Baluchis,” with the father from Yemen, the mother from Baluchistan, or the inverse. (And I say, “if they exist,” because, according to another hypothesis, “the Yemenis” may have been invented out of thin air to confuse the investigators and hide the identity of the true perpetrators from cell 1 to cell 4, all actually Pakistanis.) I read that one of them, probably their leader, was walking through the village south of Islamabad with Omar and Amjad Farooqi at the beginning of January. I read also that an employee of a telephone shop, Ehsan, heard this person make a mysterious phone call to Canada, and say, “I will complete the mission.” Who was the Canadian? Another sponsor besides Omar? One of Omar's clients? A financier? None of the articles say. And none of them say exactly what the Arabs looked like, or what organisation they belonged to. For one: the Jaish e-Mohammed of Masood Azhar . . . For another: the Jaish Aden Aben al-Islami, the Islamic army of Aden, based at Sanaa and directly linked to al-Qaida . . . And for a third, a group with ties to the Americans of Yemeni origin arrested in a Buffalo suburb at the beginning of January, a dormant al-Qaida cell in the heart of the United States . . .

This isn't an organisational chart any more, it's a labyrinth. One with signs sticking out everywhere, with Pashtun and Punjabi names, people with double, triple, quadruple identities, all of them like hedges barring entry into the heart of this shadowy world where Westerners have such difficulty identifying the different characters in the maze but where one senses, all the same, that something essential is being plotted. And enthroned in the middle, Omar, the poor man's Minotaur, planted behind a series of obstacles he has placed between himself and the truth.

And then, the September 11th arrest.

The man who may have been Pearl's executioner—one of the three Yemenis captured with bin al-Shibh in the anti-terrorist raid at Defence.

And, apart from the Yemeni, the exact status of the investigation, a rundown of all the arrests by the police or the FBI to date, seven months after the death of Daniel Pearl, and the question, in other words, of the effectiveness of anti-terrorist operations in Pakistan.

I follow the barely perceptible trace of the alleged Yemeni assasin and the confirmation of his arrest through numerous obscure corner-of-the-page news articles. His name is not mentioned. But Fazal Karim, taken by the police to the secret prison where the ten who were arrested at Defence are incarcerated, is reported to have positively identified him. Plausible. Who better than Karim, whose duty it was to control the victim during the execution, to tie his hands and then hold his head, could identify the face of the man who held the knife?

Of course I knew of the existence of Fazal Karim. During my first trip here, I had heard he was the one who, in May, had led the police and the press to the place at Gulzar e-Hijri where they found Danny's remains. But I had never really understood just when and under what circumstances he had been arrested. The answer is in an article in the 19 May edition of
Dawn.
Well, article is saying a lot, more like a filler piece. It revealed that he had been denounced by a certain “Mazharul Islam, alias Mohammad Omar Choto, alias Dhobi,” whose name I had never run across before, and who was nowhere to be found in my organisation chart of the crime. This Dhobi was arrested in April in a shakedown in the Sunni underworld related to “sectarian” anti-Shiite murders of recent months. He had in his possession video cassettes dealing with run-of-the-mill criminal activities of Lashkar I-Janghvi, or so the police thought. Except that, on viewing the videos, they realized one was footage of Danny's decapitation, and that the man they had just arrested was in charge of distributing it to foreign press agencies.

In a 19 June edition of
Dawn
, and in the
News
of the following day and the day after that, I find reports that another group of men suspected of being involved in the car bomb attack in front of the Sheraton Hotel that killed eleven French engineers of the Direction des Constructions Navales of Cherbourg were arrested on 16 June. How many were arrested? How were they treated? What court tried them? The article doesn't say. But it does mention two familiar names among the group of “terrorists” and “gangsters” caught in the Sindh police “dragnet”— Naeem Bukhari, alias Atta ur-Rehmann, the man behind the camera who dictated to Danny what phrases he should say, and Faisal, alias Zobair Chishti, his accomplice, the man who accompanied the prisoner to the toilet and shot him in the leg when he tried to escape.

In a longer article published a week later in an Urdu weekly Abdul translates for me, I learn that, during an interrogation by Pakistani police who put aside the kid gloves (allegedly in concert with an FBI team), Bukhari and Chishti fingered Akram Lahori, their chief, who was immediately arrested. Of course, the article refers to the anti-French operation at the Sheraton and the June 14 attack on the American consulate, both Lashkar sponsored. And, of course, it doesn't mention the Pearl case. But we know Lahori was present at the scene of the murder and that, as Bukhari's “supreme commander,” he may well have been at the top of the chain of command and consequently the one who took the ultimate responsibility, with Saud Memon, of calling the Yemenis and ordering the execution. So another important piece of the puzzle falls into place.

Omar himself must be added to the list.

One should also remember that the three members of Cell 2, the weak link of the chain, were arrested at the beginning of February when the FBI traced their e-mail address, [email protected], to a cybercafé in Gulistan e-Jahaur, a suburb of Karachi, from which most of the messages were sent, and then on to Fahad Naseem, who had made the mistake of operating from the hard drive of his own computer.

It's a good idea to be wary.

One must, as with the organizational chart, be extremely cautious about jumping to conclusions.

All the more so because, in addition to the vagueness of these reports and the problems of the press—its way of providing information without actually providing any, or of providing it only in dribs and drabs—you run up against the eternal problem of any investigation into Islamist groups or al-Qaida in particular: the extreme difficulty of identifying, just identifying, these masters of disguise, one of whose techniques is to multiply names, false identities, and faces.

Sometimes you think you're dealing with two men when, in reality, you're dealing with one who has two names.

Sometimes you think you're dealing with one man when, in reality, there are two using one name. Asif Ramzi, for example, is also the pseudonym of another terrorist, a resident of Muhammad Nagar in Karachi, who is also known as Hafiz or Chotto, Chotto being one of the pseudonyms of Mazhurul Islam as well, the latter also known as Dhobi, the man who had the cassette and led the police to Karim!

Someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has a mania about fake identities, has at least a dozen known aliases.

We know of half a dozen pseudonyms for Zakarias Moussaoui, the Franco-Moroccan who was Mohammed Atta's roommate and would have been the 20th hijacker in the September 11 attacks had he not been arrested in Minnesota a month earlier.