Who Killed Daniel Pearl (23 page)

In addition to five credit cards, three passports, three social security numbers and birth dates, two addresses in London and another two in the United States, a plethora of e-mail connections, cell phone numbers, and bank accounts, Omar himself has at least seventeen aliases—and these are only the ones I am aware of: Mustafa Ahmad, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Mustafa Muhammed Ahmed, Sheik Syed, Mustafa Sheikh Saeed, Omar Saiid Sheikh, Shaykh Saiid, Chaudhry Bashir, Rohit Sharma, Amir Sohail, Arvindam, Ajay Gupra, Raj Kumar, R. Verma, Khalid, P. Singh, and Wasim!

That said, I nonetheless now have a clear idea of the state of the investigation.

In short, three waves of arrests: one in February, the result of tracing the e-mail addresses; a second three months later at the beginning of May, following the attack at the Sheraton; and the most recent, in the Defence neighborhood.

Eight conspirators out of seventeen behind bars, among them the mastermind of the crime, the Yemini assassin, the boss of the team guarding Pearl at the house, the man in charge of shooting the video, and the one who had it in his possession.

And still at large, the two other Yemenis. Mussadiq and Abdul Samat, the two as yet not clearly identified members of the third cell. Ramzi (who will end up dying, at least officially, on 19 December 2002, with six other terrorists in the explosion of an apartment house in the east Karachi suburbs, where the Lashkar produced explosives in a clandestine workshop). At large as well is Mansur, the man who made the last two phone calls to Danny. (According to one report, when the Pakistani police turn up at his home, on 15 February, they find only his brothers, his wife, his son and two friends. “Mansur's not here,” they say. “Mansur just infiltrated the Jammu Kashmir”—a way of saying, in code, that he is under ISI control, according to Abdul.) Also at large, Arif: According to another report, the police, at about the same time, went to arrest him at his home in Bahawalapur, in the south. The whole family is there, in tears and formal mourning. “Hashim Qadeer is dead,” they say. “Hashim Qadeer left for the Afghan front and Allah the Merciful called him to his bosom . . . the tomb? no tomb . . . the body? no body . . . Hashim died a hero, no, better, a martyr, and everyone knows martyrs don't necessarily have a grave on earth, because they go directly to Heaven, between the angels and the virgins . . . ” At large also, of course, is Saud Memon, the proprietor of the land.

And that's when I arrive at the last, and most fruitful, observation.

Every time one of the newspapers, having released some information and so dropped a morsel of truth our way, asks the authorities for a confirmation or at least a commentary, every time you ask a cop, or a high-ranking civil servant, or even the governor of the province, if it is true that Fazal, or Bukhari, or Akram Lahori have been found and put behind bars, interrogated, you are regularly treated to obfuscations that vary only depending on the circumstances.

Thus: “Fazal Karim, don't know him . . . Bukhari, never heard of him . . . Zobair Chishti, the accomplice, never seen nor heard anything about him . . . We demand you tell your readers it is by error, a very gross and regrettable error, that your newspaper, in the editions of such and such dates, found it necessary to write that we are holding Mr. X, Y, or Z, in one way or another involved in the kidnapping of the journalist Daniel Pearl . . . ”

Or: “Yes, of course, we know who he is . . . But, just a minute here! MPO! Maintenance of Public Order! this preventive law that grants us, as policemen, the power to incarcerate antigovernment elements without telling anyone! Perhaps the people you are alluding to are in our custody . . . or in the custody of another agency . . . But we have nothing to say regarding your question . . . We have the right—indeed, the right—to make no comment on this information . . . ”

Or, even more subtle: “Yes, of course we know them . . . Yes, of course they are suspects . . . But this trial is complicated enough without introducing new suspects who can only hold up the process of arriving at the truth . . . So, for these suspects allegedly, but only allegedly, guilty, we have a legal status which is a Pakistani specialty: detained but not charged, in prison but not indicted, identified, if you like, but officially unknown . . . We realize they may bear some responsibility for this affair . . . The press is entitled, within limits and because we are indulgent, to report this possibility. But we refuse to confirm it . . . In fact, we refuse to confirm anything . . . And even this declaration that we're making to you at present, we're making it without making it and insist you record it as coming from an ‘anonymous source.' Understand?”

And the result is this Associated Press dispatch of 18 August, concerning Lahori and Bukhari: “The Pakistani authorities are not aware of their detention.”

Or this declaration given by Manzoor Mughal, “chief investigator” of the Pearl case, to the Agence France Presse the following day when asked if there had been any arrests after those of Omar and the three members of the first cell: “We have arrested no one, apart from the four who have appeared before the Court and been judged. And as for this story about the ‘Yemenis,' I say, and I repeat, no Arab has been implicated, much less arrested in the context of this case.”

Or this, a filler from the 15 July
News:
“The authorities deny that Fazal Karim is being detained in their hands.”

This note, in the following day's
Dawn,
concerning Fazal Karim and Chishti: “The decision not to announce the arrest of other suspects was made at the highest level, as early as 16 May, by the police and the Minister of the Interior of Sindh.”

Kamran Khan's 15 July citation in the
Washington Post
of a high official who said that the arrest of Lahori, however “crucial,” had occurred too late, during the “last phase” of the trial, well into the pleadings. Any official confirmation of the arrest would risk derailing the entire proceeding, and that is why it was out of the question to “make it public.”

Or: The citation of still another official, cited “anonymously” in a
Dawn
article by editorialist Anwar Iqbal, who declared, “We know who killed Pearl, but we don't want to reveal it. The trial is already a nightmare, the suspects are forever threatening officials. We don't want to go through all this again.”

No need to go into the perverse effect this sort of declaration has on the trial proceedings.

No need—or is there?—to delve into the case of this man, Omar Sheikh, who, we can assume, would not have been convicted on the same charges and might have pleaded extenuating circumstances if the arrest of accomplices—such as those who had been in charge of the guards, or had called the Yemenis, or physically held Danny while the Yemeni slit his throat—had been taken into consideration.

No matter, then, because it is not my intention to pardon the mastermind of the crime, and I don't think the presence, or absence, of a Lahori, of a Bukhari, of a Chishti, would exonerate Omar in the least of the immense responsibility of having conceived and planned the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. No matter, then, the—to say the least—bizarre course of a trial that was, on many counts, an onslaught of formalities where they nonetheless chose to ignore essential witnesses, major protagonists of the crime, even though they were under arrest and had in most cases confessed, and one needed only to cite their confessions.

What interests me for the time being is the strange, almost rhetorical, system for the treatment of information that results, every time, not in clarification but in even greater vagueness and mystery.

What bothers me is that at the very moment when the affair is being treated by process of law, every effort seems to be made to render it perfectly unintelligible. (The best observers, the most moderate and the most critical politicians, all end up no longer knowing themselves if there were actually any Yemenis; whether Lahori is dead or alive; and if the story of Fazal Karim leading the investigators to the spot where Danny was buried isn't ultimately a piece of disinformation reworked and repeated three or four times.) It's all the same, making the whole case extremely simple. (We have a culprit, and he's a good culprit; we have an assassin who is a perfect assassin; we don't want to introduce any new elements into the trial that would oblige us to stop everything: And after the trial, we don't want to take any new elements into consideration, because then we would have to start all over again.)

As though—right from the start—everyone had the same objective in mind: make the nightmare, not of the death of Danny but of the trial of his murderers, as brief as possible.

As though everyone—judges, police, political powers as well as, with very few exceptions, the press and public opinion—had tacitly agreed to get rid of the Pearl affair as rapidly as possible.

As though this affair contained a secret, a heavy and terrible secret, and that every means had to be employed to prevent this secret from being revealed.

CHAPTER 3
A SHADOWY AFFAIR

I contact one of the lawyers for the defense.

His name is Khawaja Naveed Ahmed.

He's defending, not Omar, but Sheikh Adil and Fahad Naseem, his accomplices in Cell no. 2, the only ones tried at the same time as Omar, in the same batch, so to speak—receiving twenty five years imprisonment each.

He pleads extenuating circumstances.

Like me, he has a list of all the “new elements,” the “detained but not indicted” suspects, Bukhari, Karim and, now, this Yemeni executioner, whose legal status is so unclear. All of them are reasons, for him as for Omar's lawyer, Abdul Waheed Katpar, to protest a parody of justice: “How can you judge one without judging the others? How can you get to the bottom of a crime when the man who held the weapon (the Yemeni), the one who assisted him (Fazal Karim), and the one who gave the order (Bukhari) are not even involved in the procedure? Is the fact of having bought a camera, or scanned a shot, or sent an e-mail, is this really more important than having decapitated a man or having forcefully im-mobilized him while doing so? This trial doesn't make any sense!”

I understand, from another source, that Khawaja is a militant lawyer, tending to sympathize with the cause of the jihadists he defends.

I'd heard about his declarations, fulminating against Musharraf's alignment with the United States and the human rights violations of the combined forces of the Pakistani Rangers and the FBI inspectors.

I know he protested a police raid during which “foreign” policemen forced the sister of one alleged terrorist—as it turns out, Kulsum Bano, Bukhari's sister—to open the door, thereby allowing them to look at her: how dare they! How could someone so flout another's faith and modesty? Is there a cause in this world that authorizes men to so violate a woman, if only with their eyes?

We've seen lawyers like this in Europe, in the days of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades in Italy.

I knew some of them a little—such as Klaus Croissant in Germany, whom I met with Michel Foucault—these specialists of the defense of breaking ranks, of the diversion against the bourgeoisie by the bourgeois law itself.

And in this case, there are elements that make me suspect Khawaja was the source of the hunger strike his two clients and Omar Sheikh undertook when rumors of new arrests in April and May began to circulate.

However, it's not because of this that I decide to seek him out.

Although . . . A voice, in this country smothering under the unspoken, that presumes to break the omerta . . . A voice of one who, for whatever reason, stops behaving as though the murder of Danny were a simple affair ending in a show trial . . . Why not?

He receives me in his smart, well-kept office in the Sharah e-Faisal area, in the heart of modern Karachi.

Bearded men in the stairwell. In the waiting room, bearded men. Along the wall, in the hallway, around a large color photo of Srinagar, the capital of “occupied” Kashmir, more bearded men, but they're more elegant— reminding me of Saeed Sheikh, Omar's father, the evening I caught him in front of his home in London: the portraits of the senior Khawajas, father and grandfather no doubt, the founders of the firm. Khawaja Naveed Ahmed is a modern lawyer. His English is perfect.

Like all of his colleagues bustling around him, he has the look of a young New York attorney: tie undone, shirt sleeves rolled up, a confident and forthright countenance, the smile and the laugh of a friendly fellow. He's welcoming to the French writer working on a novel about Pakistan. But his firm obviously specializes in the defense of Islamists.

“Of course all these people are in the custody of the authorities,” he begins. “They can deny it all they want. This summer, we heard again the ‘force's law officer,' Anwar Alam Subhani, who denied that the Sindh police had ever heard of the arrest of Karim and Bukhari. But there's no doubt about it. And here's proof—this is a document concerning Karim that I give you permission to publish. I'm sure you'll find it interesting.”

And over his desk, piled high with faxes, e-mails, and cardboard case files overflowing with papers, he hands me an amazing document: it's a sheet of notebook paper, covered on both sides with minuscule writing in a cramped hand, signed—in Urdu and, below that, using the Latin alphabet— by “Mazharul Hasan, son of Mohammed Sadiq, Security Cell 19.” Khawaja starts to translate and I take notes.