Who Killed Daniel Pearl (25 page)

“For a Pakistani, there's a decisive difference. Some of them—the HUM and the HUJI, the Harkat ul-Mujahideen and the Harkat ul-Jihad-al-Islami—have in common that they are notoriously linked to the army and the secret services. You see, here on my chart, the arrow runs towards the top, meaning Islamabad. Whereas the Lashkar is a relatively free electron that nobody minds using as a cover. That's what its being on the left margin of the page signifies.”

He bursts out laughing.

“It looks complicated to you? No, no, in every hypothesis, there's a very simple constant. You have, there”—he stops and points to the ceiling, snatching the sheet back from me at the same time and quickly putting it under a stack of papers, “people who have known everything and supervised everything, right from the start. People in high places who have always known where the body was and who decided, at a given time, to release the information by playing the Fazal card. The rest, all the rest, would be, if this is right, just an act.”

He says much more, of course. I am oversimplifying. But as I listen to him, I'm thinking about the very strange story of the death of Riaz Basra, who was chief of the Lashkar i-Janghvi before Akram Lahori, and who died in an ambush last May, two days, as if by a coincidence, before the names of Fazal and Bukhari were put into circulation. Abdul explained to me that there never was any ambush. In reality, Basra was already in the hands of the services, and had been for several months, for reasons that had nothing to do with the Pearl affair. Materially speaking, there couldn't have been an ambush, and the man could only have been cold-bloodedly executed: because, in fact, he was being held as Fazal and Bukhari are held today; and they suddenly decided—two days, I repeat, before the arrest of Fazal and Bukhari—that it would be better to make him disappear. Why? What were they afraid to see him do or hear him say? Were they afraid he would protest that they were flattering his group by attributing to it a role in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl? Were they afraid Basra would say: “Look here, I'm the chief and until you hear otherwise, I am aware of what people in my group are doing and not doing! What is this cock-and-bull tale about Fazal and Bukhari being involved at the heart of an affair that's either none of our business or in which we were mere subcontractors?” In other words, was there a risk that Basra would blow the whole operation that Khawaja had just described and thereby make it obvious that the responsibility for the crime rested squarely on the shoulders of the HUM and the HUJI—the two groups they were trying to extricate from the game?

I'm thinking of another friend, a journalist at a Karachi daily, who told me that, at around the same time, the 18 or 20 of May, which was also the time of Fazal's arrest and when Lashkar was put in the forefront, he and many of his colleagues received a strange phone call from an organization that none of them could quite catch the name of. Maybe the “Hezbullah Alami” . . . Or the “al-Saiqua” . . . Or maybe “al Saiqua” renamed “Hezbullah Alami” . . . The caller claimed triple responsibility for the 17 March attack on the Protestant church of Islamabad, the 8 May suicide operation against the French engineers at the Sheraton, and, finally, the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. “The HUM and the HUJI had nothing to do with these things,” said the mysterious caller. “The operation was planned by a 100% anti-Musharraf organization. We are that 100% anti-Musharraf organisation. We are 100% angry with the politics of Musharraf, who has become the Americans' lap dog. And here is the best proof, that only we can supply: The cadaver found at Gulzar e-Hijri is not Daniel Pearl's. The Americans are well aware of this, and that's why they have never made public the results of the DNA tests run on the skeleton.”

Propaganda, obviously. Manoeuvre immediately exposed. But isn't it the same strategy? The same desire to confuse the issue? Another effort to divert suspicion from all the groups related in one way or another to the Pakistani government and the ISI?

I watch Khawaja.

All of a sudden he seems strange.

Too jovial, too self-satisfied.

And I wonder what game, ultimately, he is playing by planting these doubts in my mind.

Because, after all, shouldn't it be in the interest of the attorney for Sheikh Adil and Fahad Naseem, who both belong to Jaish e-Mohammed, to turn the spotlight, instead, on the Lashkar?

And how can he at once use the arrest of Fazal to demand a retrial for Omar and then, in the same breath, imagine the same Fazal is an agent who has been manipulated?

After all, perhaps he's the one who's trying to misinform me.

Or perhaps Khawaja thinks the best way of exonerating his client is to bury the crime in an immense plot, indemonstrable, indecipherable, that goes all the way up to the highest level of the State.

I think of his main argument: Why didn't Fazal, or the “special informer,” go to the Americans to claim the reward rather than end up in prison? There could be a simple explanation: Fazal is really guilty, he really held Danny's neck so the Yemeni could begin his work, and he couldn't go see the Americans and thereby take the risk of giving himself up and ending up in the electric chair.

I think about Omar. I don't understand his attitude either. In my mind I go over all his declarations, during and after his trial, that I found yesterday with Abdul. Suddenly I find them very restrained, very sensible. And, apart from obligatory provocations for their own sake, in the end rather reasonable. Why doesn't he himself protest this scandal of the “detained but not indicted” more vehemently? Why, if Khawaja's last hypothesis is right, don't we hear him shouting that he's being made the fall guy for a crime committed by many and, perhaps, with the support of people in high places?

It's all becoming so complex . . .

So terribly contradictory, dizzyingly so . . .

An imbroglio. In the true sense of the term, a nebula where I have the feeling of watching the cloud of dust around the mystery of the Pearl affair become denser and denser . . .

I leave Khawaja, with his knowing smiles, his bearded men, his wild hypotheses, his questions, in a state of even greater confusion than when I arrived.

CHAPTER 4
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF OMAR

As has often been the case in this investigation, it's luck that sets me on the path to clarification.

I'm at my hotel.

I'm thinking about all Khawaja's disconcerting hypotheses.

Feeling lost, almost demoralised, I'm thinking of even going back to France and returning in a more official capacity that would allow me to go back to the authorities and ask them the questions I've been thinking about.

And then Abdul, who has taken beautifully to his new role as fixer, comes to my room without warning—meaning, in our old code, that he has some information so sensitive that we should avoid using even the phone line within the hotel.

“I don't have what you asked for,” he begins mysteriously, with a triumphant look.

I had asked him to find a contact on the staff of Lashkar i-Janghvi which, at that time, wasn't yet on the Americans' blacklist of terrorist organizations.

“No, I don't have it. But I have something better. Someone who heard what we're looking for contacted me. He says everything that's being said about Omar Sheikh's arrest is bullshit, and that he knows the truth . . . ”

I know what's being said. I know the official version, which had been distributed immediately to the press agencies and the embassies. Having arrested the source of the e-mails they had traced, they wrapped things up the day the police raided Omar's aunt's house in Karachi and his grandfather's home in Lahore. They forced Ismaïl, the grandfather, to call Omar and plead with him to surrender. One of the inspectors grabbed the phone from the old man. “You're done for, Omar, give yourself up,” he said. And the good Omar gave himself up to spare his family danger.

“So how is that bullshit? How can the e-mails they traced be bullshit?”

“That's exactly what we're going to find out!” Abdul replies excitedly. “You have a date with this guy today, at 6, in the old city, near Aurangzeb Park, where the junkies hang out. It will bring back memories. Don't worry, he's safe. He comes through my friend X, who's one of the best journalists in town and has my complete trust.”

I'm a bit hesitant.

I can't help thinking that this kind of encounter, in one of the most squalid parts of the city, is precisely the kind of thing I should avoid.

And I recall the virtual catalogue of advice, a Bible for any journalist arriving in Karachi and which Pearl, unfortunately, ultimately didn't take into account: never take a hotel room facing the street; never flag down a taxi in the street; never, ever speak of Islam, or of Pakistan's nuclear program; and especially and above all, never go to street markets, cinemas, crowded areas, or public places in general without taking precautions, without telling someone you trust where you are going and what time you should be back—and Aurangzeb! A neighborhood known for drugs and crime!

Nonetheless, the proposition is very tempting.

Abdul explains that, in any case, the man would never come to the big hotels in town, where we usually arrange meetings. He says we have a phone date with the man in an hour, and then I can request that the meeting take place in our car, and that under no circumstances should we get out of the vehicle. Finally, I accept.

So here we are, a little before 6, at the intersection of Aurangzeb Park and Jinnah Road, Abdul behind the wheel and me in the back seat, watching for a man whose only clue as to what to look for is, in itself, rather reassuring in its naïveté: He will be waiting under the billboard for Pepsi-Cola, and will be wearing, under his jacket, “a very elegant, embroidered, multicolored vest.”

Around us, groups of shaggy-haired young people with puffy features have taken over the sidewalk, the pale blue imitation ceramic-style steps that climb to the gates of the park, and farther, inside the park, the wooden benches and the pathways.

From afar, you would take them for beggars, waiting for rich people coming from the nearby Sabri restaurant and giving them free food. You would also take them for members of some strange, black-magic sect, or a legion of the supine, bivouacked in the middle of the city.

But they're just addicts.

They are the Karachi contingent of a reserve army of drugs and crime.

God knows I've seen sanctuaries like this before!

I remember the part of Bombay around the Stiffles Hotel, thirty years ago, where every junkie in the city—of the country, even—seemed to congregate: Young drifters off to nowhere, fanatic users, hooked on needles, with dead eyes, ready to kill mother and father and, above all, themselves for a fix of bad coke cut with talcum powder and medicines, worth, at the time, the price of a can of beer—and yet, as I once had the misfortune to discover, such force left in those apparently wasted bodies when they confront you!

But this . . . This shady hellhole . . . The scorched esplanade turned into a dumping ground for syringes . . . These heaps of bodies, with faces at once patient and feverish, some of them huddled around a camping stove cooking a tin of
Nihari,
the beef marinated in thick, spicy sauce, the favorite dish in Karachi . . . These two men fighting over an old rope mat . . . That person lying on a slightly better looking rug, seemingly dead or at least dead to the world . . . These others, pressed against each other, nearly comatose, around the ruin of what might have been an ancient fountain, which is in the center of the esplanade . . . These stunted trees, covered with black soot, that border the gates and provide these poor people an imaginary shelter . . . Down to the dogs and cats (for it's the only place in Karachi where I've seen so many animals that no one will bother), the mongrels wandering between the rugs, bizarre, moaning, sort of floating along, looking for a piece of vegetable peel, a little bone— Karachis say they inhale so much of the smoke or the fumes that they end up drugged as well . . . No, I've never seen this!

“Sorry!” says the man we neither saw nor heard arrive, as he opens the front door with an air of authority.

“Sorry!” he repeats as he sits next to Abdul, pointing out a pair of dirty, rag-clad youngsters, probably foreigners, who have followed him, and whom he dismisses, through the window, as one would flick away flies—I barely have time, before the car drives off, to catch the delicate features and the pleading expression of one, a young girl.

“This was the only solution. It's one of the rare areas where the police don't venture,” he says.

He turns half-way around. What strikes me is not his vest, but the too-large shoulder pads of his jacket. And then the bony face, black hair with a low forehead, the Nietzschian moustache, with fine, tight wrinkles around the eyes. He smiles, with a roguish air, and adds in a gravely voice: “Except me, of course.”

For the man—I shall call him “Tariq”—tells us he is a policeman. He explains he has information about Omar's interrogation by police officers Athar Rashid and Faisal Noor in Karachi. And if he sought us out, it is because some people in the Sindh police are not happy about the way things transpired.

“First question,” he begins, after a brief reminder of the conditions of our meeting and the precautions I should take so that he will not be identified: “Do you know when the Sheikh was arrested?” I know what everyone knows. I know what the European and Pakistani press printed.