Who Killed Daniel Pearl (28 page)

So Omar recounts this story. He goes into detail on his series of kidnappings. You see him running around town like a rutting animal, hunting for victims. He describes a method, which is exactly the one he will put into use eight years later with Daniel Pearl: the strategy of making them trust you; setting up a house in a remote area of town, in Saharanpur; purchasing a camera; the chains; everything down to the snapshots he sends to the press and which I saw—gun against the temple, the day's newspaper as background. At least the script was well-rehearsed! Then, as his narrative continues, three elements emerge that indicate the entire operation would not have been feasible without the active support of the Pakistani embassy in Delhi.

The house. The fact that he buys the house. He gives the price, 130,000 rupees, and explains very clearly that he doesn't rent it, he buys it. Where did he get the money, the 130,000 rupees?

The weapons. The day Yusuf, his sidekick, finds him in a park, near Jama Masjid, with a plastic bag containing two handguns. The day, not long after, he brought an AK-47 and two grenades back to their hideout. Impossible, I'm told by my sources, and I think they're right, to bring an AK-47, grenades and handguns into India without diplomatic assistance.

And then, the most significant, this admission, on page fourteen of the transcript. He comes back to his military training stints in Afghanistan. He talks about the two times, in 1993 and 1994, he stayed in the Miran Shah and Khalid Bin Waleed camps. He explains in detail how he is trained to “handle pistols, revolvers, assault rifles, AK-47 machine guns, LPG and GPMG rocket launchers.” He recounts his apprenticeship in those actual “techniques“ of “organizing an ambush, handling grenades, mines, explosives. Living clandestinely, the art of shadowing someone, of moving around at night.” And, in passing, he gives the names of his two instructors, two men to whom he owes everything because they taught him everything on these subjects: Subedar Saleem and Subedar Abdul Hafeez, who are, he specifies, former members of the SSG—otherwise known as the Special Services Group, the elite unit of the ISI!

Document no. 3. His diary. Not the police transcript anymore, but his personal diary, kept by Omar himself, at the beginning of his stay in Indian jails, in which he recounts in even more detail the series of kidnappings that have brought him to this point.

The Pakistanis, who know about this diary, regularly make it known that it can only be a fake, fabricated by the Indian police—who ever heard of a terrorist, in jail, starting a diary which is a chronicle of his life? Everything is possible, of course. I've seen enough dirty tricks in my life to know that everything is possible and that the Indians, just like the Algerians or the Israelis or any other secret service in the world, are capable of anything when it comes to disinformation. But in this case I don't believe it. First, you see everything in jails; anything is conceivable. Why not a killer keeping his own diary? Omar, furthermore, has never denied it. He read, as did everyone, excerpts published in the Indian press. He knows that the Pakistani papers also talked about “Omar's Diary” as an essential element of the case. And he never in the slightest denied its authenticity. And then I saw the text, finally. I went to the Records Room of the criminal court in New Delhi, in Patiala House, where I managed to get them to take the original fifty-page manuscript out of the archives, declassify it, and photocopy it for me. And, from the very first pages, I recognized the handwriting, only slightly more mature than that of his school homework. Which means that the theory of a fake diary can only stand up if it's leaning on another, and that supporting theory is itself not very convincing even though you regularly find Pakistani diehards propounding it: that Omar was an accomplice in its counterfeiting, because he has ties to India. Or, to be more exact, he was recruited by the Indians during his years in prison at Uttar Pradesh and then in Tihar Jail, and has since become their man. (Aren't there even sources—the
Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review
, of course—that came up with the idea that Omar was a CIA agent, used in the CIA's hunt for bin Laden?)

The first thing that strikes you, in those fifty pages, is the writing itself. You actually have to say the
writings
. Good in the first pages, with round letters, nicely shaped and regular, with mistakes crossed out neatly. And then starting on page 13 or 14, the penmanship goes awry: it becomes smaller, less readable, slanted slightly towards the right when up until that point it had been vertical, with unfinished letters,
G
s that look like
Y
s,
D
s you mistake for
L
s, the writing of a fifteen-year-old. And even younger in the last pages which are a chronology of his life before India, then very brief biographical sketches of his parents and the people he is close to, and finally some samples of his writing and his signature—obviously provided at the demand of prison authorities—which have been stapled to the rest. In those last ten pages, yes, I'm struck by the clumsiness, the scribbled, fly-speck aspect of the handwriting. Here, too, as in his photos, Omar is someone who can change age in front of your eyes. Here, too, a peculiar capacity for splitting in two, for being several people in one. The faces . . . The talent for changing his accent, almost his voice, according to circumstances . . . And now, writing that is so unsure of its identity . . . Despite my distrust of the so-called rules of the so-called science of handwriting analysis, how can I not in this instance let myself be tempted?

The second thing that amazes me is the language. The poverty of the language and the style. The childish nature of the narrative. And even, according to Lara Fielden and James Mitchell, English and American friends and fixers, to whom I showed this document, the numerous bizarre turns of phrase, not exactly improprieties but slightly off in a way unexpected from the pen of a former student of the Forest School and the London School of Economics. “Female partner” instead of “girlfriend” . . . “Member of the public” instead of “someone in the street” or “passerby” . . . “I clasped” instead of “I shook” his hand . . . “I espied” Siddiqui, instead of simply “I saw” or “I spotted” . . . And, in a passage about the “village” that he tells his victims he just inherited and which he invites them to come and visit, his weird way of saying that it is “on” instead of “in” his name . . . A sign that the text is deliberately flawed? A message— and if so, what is it, to whom is it addressed, and what does it say? Or is it a sign of pomposity, of preciousness, the linguistic equivalent of the arrogance I noted in his youthful photos?

Interesting, too, the extraordinary amateurishness of the little gang of kidnappers he forms with Amine, Sultan, Osman, Farooq, Salahuddin, Nasir and Siddiqui. The feverish hunt for victims. The clumsiness in approaching them. The slipups. The driver of the van, whom he notices, too late, doesn't pray with him and is therefore not as reliable as he had assumed. The incredible story of Akhmir, the Israeli giant who immediately falls into the trap, whom he brings back one night, at two in the morning, to the house in Ganda Nala where they plan to hold him. “You're crazy!” shouts the boss when he sees, through a chink in the curtains, this oversized guy, too strong, too threatening. “You're going to get us all killed! Take him back to his hotel!” The contradictory orders. The permanently make-shift atmosphere. Excursions, hand-in-hand, talking about what a good time they're having. The telephone numbers that are always wrong. The agencies, newspapers, and embassies whose addresses they realize— right at the moment they're supposed to be sending them the message claiming responsiblity for a job—they don't have. He goes himself to the
Hindustan Times
to deliver one letter. Catastrophe! The managing editor is out, it's his deputy who takes the letter, opens it in front of him and starts to read it, barely giving him time to gallop down the stairs two at a time. The photos . . . Hey, boss, what if we took photos of the hostages. Yeah, boss, you remember, like they did in Lebanon, with the newspaper in the background to show the date. OK, says the boss. We hadn't thought of it, but it is indeed a good idea, we'll buy a camera and take the photos. Fearsome killers. The heart of the contemporary terrorist machine. But also the Three Stooges.

And the boss himself, the only one without a name, whose mysterious shadow haunts the pages. Sometimes Omar calls him “Big Man.” Other times “Shah Sahab,” the name he'll give to Gilani eight years later in his e-mails to Pearl. In another police interrogation I also had access to, he also calls him “Shahjoi.” In the paragraph Omar writes about him in the biographical sketches at the end of the text, he refers to him as “the chief of the mission” and calls him simply “Commander.” And in the “Personality” section, he says that, although the Commander is “moody at times,” he's “very good at controlling the people.” He's the real boss of the group, in any case. The strategist. The man who decides the Israeli must be set free, that they need to concentrate on Americans, or, if there aren't any Americans, go for English or French. He's the man, too, who draws up the list of Kashmiri militants whose freedom will be demanded in exchange for the four hostages. The wily one who decides to add several unimportant names to the list of who they really want freed, to cover up their tracks. The treasurer. The one who decides whether or not to buy the house or the van, and who makes sure that the group, should things go wrong, has enough cash to beat a retreat. He's the man who, finally, has the contact with Islamabad and who keeps saying, about the money and everything else, “I'm calling Islamabad . . . I've called Islamabad . . . Islamabad agrees . . . the instructions from Islamabad are . . . ” Omar points out, in fact, that it's in Islamabad, in July before his departure, that he meets this harsh, passionless character, the commander—who is using the name Zubair Shah and in the company of Maulana Abdullah—for the first time. Except Omar, still in his diary, says the man is rather “paternal” towards him.

So who is Shah Sahab, exactly? Why is he never named? And why is he the only one who feels the need to conceal his face when he goes to see the hostages? Omar says, “Shah Sahab veiled himself.” The former hostage Rhys Partridge will remember the arrival of a character everybody called the Commander, with a kitsch watch on his wrist and “a tea towel on his head.” For the Indians, the reason is obvious: the tone, the way he's constantly asserting his link to Islamabad, all this indicates a high-level agent—very probably General Zahir ul-Islam Abbasi who was, that year, the Pakistani military attaché in India, and who, when he returned in 1996, had a hand in an attempted coup d'etat, was court-martialled and convicted, then freed in 2001, after which he became one of the star orators of the Harkat ul-Mujahideen, Harkat ul-jihad al-Islami, Lashkar e-Toiba and so on. For me, the situation isn't that simple and two details in the diary give me pause. The fact that on at least one occasion—the day of the aborted kidnapping of the Israeli giant—we see the “Big Man” spend the night in Ganda Nala, with Sultan, Nasim and Farooq: Would the military attaché have done that? Would he have shared the discomfort of this shack? And more particularly the fact that twice—the day he visited the hostages and also the day they composed the letters to the press—Omar says he had to translate Shah Sahab's words into English: Would a diplomat have needed that? Wouldn't he have written the letters himself? On the whole, though, I think you have to go along with the Indians on the idea that Shah Sahab is an agent. And were I to doubt it, there's a little note, right at the end of the diary, in the “previous association” section of the biographical notes, that supports this: “SSG,” says the note. Shah Sahab's “previous associations” are the Harkat ul-jihad al-Islami, and the Hizb e-Islami, but also, like Subedar Saleem and Subedar Abdul Hafeez, Omar's instructors from the Miran Shah camp, the SSG— the Special Services Group, the elite unit of the ISI.

The Indians also tell me that it was the station chief of the ISI who, under the cover of the Pakistani embassy in London, paid Omar's lawyer when he was arrested.

They give me the list showing how many times the various embassy attachés—and particularly the military attachés—came to visit him in prison.

“How's that?” I ask. “His friend Peter Gee told me it was the British consul who was taking care of Omar, and of Gee as well.”

“There you are,” Datta replies. “Omar was British, as you say. A subject of Her Majesty. Treated in the same way as the musician smuggling marijuana. Except that it really was the Pakistanis who came to visit him the most often, and here's proof, here's the visitors' register.”

They also inform me that, six years later, in the spring of 2000, when the time came for him to return to Pakistan after his liberation in Kandahar, it was an ISI colonel who was waiting for him at the border to drive him to a safe-house where they debriefed him.

“Here's a man,” Datta continues, “who owes his freedom to an exceptionally serious plane hijacking. Every newspaper in the region and even the world was full of photos of him, of Masood Azhar, and of the poor passenger who was horribly decapitated a few hours before their liberation. And, along the same lines, Masood Azhar, as soon as he was home, held meeting after meeting, founded his Jaish e-Mohammed, showed off at the Karachi press club, and traipsed around every town in Pakistan, surrounded by a veritable private army of turbaned men. And Omar Sheikh, instead of staying in Afghanistan, or fleeing to Yemen, Iraq or North Korea, instead of hiding, goes back to his house on Mohni Road in Lahore, gets married, has a child and gives press conferences, too. How do you explain that? How do you explain this insolent impunity without assuming an active complicity, from the beginning, with the Pakistani governments, the visible and the invisible one?”