Who Killed Daniel Pearl (26 page)

“The 12th. According to the press, he was arrested on the 12th of February, just a few days after . . . ”

He interrupts me with the teasing expression of someone who has set a trap into which you have just, obligingly, fallen.

“One sentence, two errors, Mr. Journalist! Omar was not arrested, he turned himself in. And he didn't turn himself in on the 12th but on the 5th, Tuesday, the 5th, in the evening.”

The car turns down a road which could take us far from the park in the direction of Jinnah Road and the Jama Cloth Market. He gestures to Abdul to make a right. Since he's gotten in the car, he hasn't stopped stealing furtive glances right and left, punctuated by slight, jerky movements of his neck.

“Next question,” he continues. “Do you know who Brigadier Ijaz Ejaz Shah is?”

I don't know who Brigadier Ijaz Ejaz Shah is.

“What? I thought you came from Lahore . . . ”

I glance at Abdul in the rearview mirror to express my surprise that the man knows this. Abdul looks incredulous, lifts an eyebrow as if to say, still another mystery of Karachi . . .

“You've come from Lahore, but you don't know who Ijaz is? Think again,” Tariq insists.

I think about it and remember the tall silhouette of a thin, bald man I met at the Liberty Lions Club in Lahore. He was introduced to me as the Minister of the Interior of Punjab, the strong man of the region, and I seem to recall his name was Ijaz.

“Brigadier Ijaz,” he continues in a resonant voice, like a teacher instructing the class dunce, without turning round to face me, “is not just the Minister of the Interior of Punjab. He is also a close friend of Musharraf. More importantly, he's an ISI man, a very high-ranking agent, ex-chief of the agency's Air Force, in charge until only recently of relations with the Harkat ul-Mujahideen and the Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami. Now, attention!”

He turns around and looks at me with a frankly hostile expression. I can't say if he's doing this for effect, or if he is suddenly seized by a genuine rush of contempt for an ignorant Westerner.

“He is the one the Sheikh turned himself in to on the evening of the 5th. The Sheikh knows him, of course, because the HUM and the HUJI are the two groups Ijaz is associated with and so he decides to give himself up to this old acquaintance.”

Now I vaguely remember, as though in a fog, the Brigadier's reaction when the diplomat accompanying me had introduced me to him, his visible recoil, his smile turned glacial at the mention of my project, a “novel” about Daniel Pearl.

“Meaning . . . ” I say to him, taken aback and not sure I understand.

The car turns and starts up a narrow, steep street, a dangerous back alley leading back to the park. Past a butcher's stall that smells of meat gone bad. Next to it, a bunch of skinny dogs are fighting over a pile of stinking fish viscera. With the overhead light on, Tariq reaches into his pocket and hands me a wrinkled piece of paper without actually letting go of it. Then he takes it back quickly. But I have time to see it is a carbon copy of a note, in English, on police letterhead, confirming the surrender of Omar on the 5th, to Brigadier Ijaz.

“This means that seven days go by between the moment when the Sheikh turns himself in to this high-ranking ISI official and the time, on the 12th, when he is handed over, by a special flight from Lahore to Karachi, to us, to the police. During those seven days, he is kept in secret in an ISI safe house, solely in the hands of ISI agents. The police know nothing about it. The FBI and the American Embassy know nothing about it. No one, do you hear me, no one knows, during those seven days, that the presumed organizer of Daniel Pearl's kidnapping is there in Lahore, in the hands of the Pakistani secret services.”

The car pulls close to the wall to let pass some young people walking right down the middle of the street, weaving, as though they were drunk. I'm not sure I understand him.

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning that things happened the way they always happen in this country. When a jihadist is arrested, he always has the name and the number of a brigadier he asks us to call and who always tells us, the cops: let him go.”

“Except, this time—”

“You understand. In this case, the Sheikh didn't wait to be arrested. As soon as he saw that it was going badly, he decided to take things in his own hands and get in touch with his contact. The fact is, the Sheikh is one of the ISI's men. He has been for a long time. And all this is the story of an agent who plans an action, and sees things go wrong, and, when they go wrong, goes to report it: ‘Chief, we've got a problem, what shall we do?'”

“And so, what do they do?”

“They spend seven days and seven nights, among people from the services, trying to come to an agreement. On what? On what to say and not to say to the police. On what is going to happen to him once he's turned himself in, and on the guarantees they can grant him. I won't tell them anything I know, he promises. I'll protect the ISI. I won't tell anyone about its role in the Pearl affair, or in the combat of jihadists in Kashmir. But you have to commit to protecting me from being extradited and, if I'm condemned, to getting me out of this situation as quickly as possible. For seven days they negotiate this. Seven days to put together a scenario. Seven days to find the best way for everyone to get out of the mess they've gotten themselves into.”

I remember all the things I read about those days of fever and anxiety. I remember that, at the time, the authorities were still hoping to find Pearl alive and were racing against the clock, counting the hours and the minutes. Can't we imagine, I ask, that those seven days were used to give Omar the third degree? Weren't there people in the agencies who felt that the only thing that counted was to make him reveal, by any means necessary, where the journalist was being held? And moreover, isn't this what Omar told the court in Hyderabad in a 21 June declaration cited by the
News
that dovetails, as a matter of fact, with this story of disappearing for seven days but gives the opposite interpretation—he talks about a week of “harassment,” of them “breathing down his neck,” a week in which they had “fabricated evidence” against him?

Tariq shrugs his shoulders.

“On the contrary. Those seven days were seven days lost for the investigation. You're not a cop, but you can imagine. Seven days is the time it took for the people who killed him to hide the body, erase any clues, and disappear.”

“And the accusations of harassment? The idea that the people he was dealing with brutalized him?”

“The risk, in situations like this, is always that the agent who has been burned panics and spills everything to the press. So, of course, the services conditioned him. They may even have threatened him. Musharraf talked to the father, who talked to the son, pleading with him to avoid any declarations harmful to Pakistani national interests. But look at his face when he came out of the safe house and was delivered to us. He was fine. He was smiling. He had the look of someone who had been given assurances. He didn't appear to be a man who had been raked over the coals for seven days. And, for that matter . . . ”

He takes his time. Then, the sardonic smile of a brute. I hadn't noticed that half his front teeth were capped in silver, like the whores in Tashkent.

“ . . . for that matter, we would have liked to have given him the third degree when we got him ourselves. We know how to do that sort of thing. But I'll give you another scoop—the order came down from the highest level not to do that. And one of their men was sent, unannounced, to keep an eye on our men during the entire interrogation. Result: the Sheikh said nothing. Nothing. And there was a moment, apparently, when he wanted to talk about what he did when he left the Indian prisons. But ‘they' were immediately informed, and we got a phone call from someone in the President's cabinet telling us: ‘Watch it! Stop everything! Keep him quiet and turn him over to the judge.'”

I sense that Tariq is telling the truth. And I add what he says to some bits of information I picked up in my research: A report on Pakistani channel PTV2 presented, in April, a thesis not far from his . . . The 13 March
Newsweek
article describing an Omar arrogant before the police who interrogated him—”sure,” he declared, that he would not be extradited and that he wouldn't pass more than “three or four years” in Pakistani prisons . . . Another article citing his lawyers' protest of a procedural trick that prevented the reintroduction of the testimony of Hamid Ullah Memon, the superior police officer in charge of the arrest and responsible for the February deposition . . . Still another reporting the judge's complaint that the police interrogation was incomplete, lacking in depth, and when a mocking Omar said, “What do they mean by saying the interrogation is incomplete? They stopped interrogating me more than a fortnight ago. I am prepared to talk to them, but they are afraid of my talking.”

I start again.

“Let's back up for a second. What ‘went wrong,' as you put it? Why, in your perception of things, was Omar forced to turn himself in and set all this in motion?”

Tariq hesitates once again and looks outside for a long while. Perhaps he's not really sure himself.

“There are two theories. The first is that the team bungled things. The story about the e-mails for example. The inexperience of Naseem who was picked up almost immediately and who, of course, ratted on the boss. Or, even dumber, the fact that they continued for several days to make calls on the journalist's mobile phone, which were traced. Everything was planned, except for the novices' errors . . . ”

I think of the obscenity of this mobile phone, continuing, like nails or hair, to live its own life after the death of its owner.

I think about Abdul Majid, the cell phone salesman I found on Bank Road, in Islamabad, who had sold Omar two of the six phones he had used during the operation. He also told me a story about the kidnappers— that they had been thrilled like kids to be using a triband mobile phone with an American number, from which they could play at threatening the investigators, their families, their children.

I think also of another story, strange and unexplained: a plane ticket for Pakistan Airlines flight PK 757, London to Islamabad, file number EEEFQH, was purchased in the name of Daniel Pearl on 8 February, eight days after his death, by someone who would have had to present his passport and a valid visa.

“Or else, the second hypothesis,” Tariq continues. “We're not actually certain Pearl's execution was planned. When Sheikh says that he learned of it when he called ‘Siddiqui' from Lahore on 5 February to give him the order to ‘send the patient to the doctor' but was told ‘too late! Dad is dead, we did the scan and the X-rays,' I'm not excluding the possibility that he was telling the truth. So maybe things went off the track there. Perhaps Pearl was executed against the instructions of Omar and the people behind the operation.”

Tariq turns to face me again, and takes my arm, violently, with a feigned intensity which, I guess, is supposed to convey the sorrow we share, the sympathy.

“The piece of the puzzle I lack is who decided to contravene the instructions. The actual team themselves, who went off the deep end? Or other sponsors, interfering with the orders of the original backers? It often happens that way. You think you're alone in an action, but in fact, there are two of you. And the second one shows his hand while your back is turned. Sorry. I really don't know.”

“All right,” I say, removing my arm from his grasp. “But one last question, the very last. Why seven days before giving Omar back to your colleagues? Did they really need all that time to put together a scenario?”

“There are two things,” he says, still turned towards me, with his sardonic Tashkent smile. “You're right to ask, because there are two different things. First, it's not an easy case. Imagine, once more, the panic of these people when they discover that these guys have lost it and executed the hostage. The panic in the services! The frenzied attempt to cover things over, disconnect the circuits, erase the traces that could lead to the higher-ups, convince the Sheikh to take the responsibility and not to finger too many people, save what they can and invent a whole story for the Americans. And then . . . ”

I get the impression he's hesitating again. I try to catch Abdul's eye, to see if a bill won't fix things. But no. That's not it. There's the beginning of a fight, two guys, in the light of a doorway, with broken bottles. For a second, his cop reflex has resurfaced. Then he continues.

“Think about it . . . Five and seven equals twelve—the day Musharraf is to arrive in Washington. Add another two and it's on the 14th that Omar's first interrogation began. The same day Musharraf was received by Bush, the end of his trip to the United States.”

“So what?”

“I don't know. You tell me. Musharraf is a President who's playing a difficult role in terms of diplomacy. He discusses, he negotiates. His primary request when he met with Bush, the delivery of F-16s, frozen because of our conflict with India, is, by the way, the same request that appears in the kidnappers' communiqués. And yet, all through the negotiations, Musharraf says nothing. Above all, he doesn't want to worry the Americans. He even has the nerve to declare, in his press conference with Bush, that he is ‘reasonably sure than Daniel Pearl is still alive' and that we're ‘as near as possible to these culprits.' And when it's all over, when the negotiations are finished, when everyone realizes that the Americans won't give, when there's nothing left to negotiate, the truth explodes— Omar's name, his arrest, and the death of the American journalist. Don't you find that disconcerting?”