Who Killed Daniel Pearl (31 page)

The truth, I'm starting to realize, is that I have fallen into—or more importantly Daniel Pearl fell into—an unusual hotel, a refuge for visiting Kashmiri militants and fighters when they're in Rawalpindi.

The truth—I learn in the hours that follow when I find my local source—is that Kashmiri fighters get rooms at a discount (those rooms on the third and fourth floors, in fact) and free tea in the morning.

The truth—from the same source—is that, besides these fighters and fierce peasants who come here seeking a bit of warmth, other much more important men are regulars here, men who have in common a close tie to the country's special services: prominent advocates of the Kashmiri cause, like the journalist from Jammu, Ved Bhasim, or the pro-Pakistani Indian politician Bzaz; Abdul Ghani Lone, another notorious Kashmiri, who housed the guests to his son Sajjad's wedding here; all the big jihadist leaders, who, until the recent wave of restrictions, would organize their press conferences here, with the blessing of the ISI.

In short, the place Omar chose for his first meeting with Pearl is a place where the Pakistani secret services are at home.

The hotel he chose for their first encounter was not in fact an ordinary hotel, but rather one controlled, almost managed, by the ISI.

There are three hotels of this kind in Pakistan. Surely there are others. But I spotted at least three: the Sangam in Mazzafarabad; the Margalla, in Islamabad, two kilometers past the French embassy on the Serena road; and the Hotel Akbar, which I discovered belongs, officially, to a Kashmiri named Chaudhary Akbar but which is one of the ISI's locations in Rawalpindi.

Everything converges.

From the organization of the crime to the biography of its authors, from Omar's past to that of certain of his henchmen, from India to Pakistan, from Lahore to Islamabad, from backstage at the plane hijacking in Kandahar to backstage at the Hotel Akbar, everything points to the direct and close involvement of the Pakistani secret service.

No more psychology, at this point.

Yes, Mariane was right, at this level you can no longer see how analyzing the psychology, the moods, of Omar could have any effect on the obvious reality.

Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and then murdered by Islamist groups who were manipulated by a single fringe group of the secret service—the most radical, the most violent, the most anti-American of the factions fighting for control of the services; but how can it be denied that this faction behaved, from the beginning to the end of the affair, as if it were perfectly at home in Musharraf's Pakistan?

This crime was not petty, a murder for nothing, an uncontrolled act of fundamentalist fanatics—it's a crime of state, intended and authorized, whether we like it or not, by the state of Pakistan. As Aldo Moro, to quote him again, said in his tragic letter to his wife Noretta, in which he announced to the likes of Cossiga, Zaccagnini and Zizola that his blood would fall on them, it's a “state massacre.” The paradox, of course, is that it implicates a country which is a friend to the United States and the West, an ally in the fight to the death against the “Axis of Evil,” in other words, a full-fledged member of the antiterrorist coalition.

That's the provisional conclusion of this book, in October 2002.

At this stage of the investigation, that's my first and terrifying conclusion.

                         
PART FOUR
AL-QAIDA

CHAPTER 1
RETURN TO THE HOUSE OF THE CRIME

But that's not all.

I was far from finished being surprised.

And I had yet to discover the most extraordinary, and edifying, aspect of the story.

It is now November 2002.

I am, again, back in Pakistan.

This time I'm here officially, with a visa, a stamp, I go through the whole business: visit to the ambassador in Paris, meeting in Islamabad with the Minister of the Interior, to whom I have to show at least part of my hand—“I am writing a novel about the death of Daniel Pearl . . . yes, yes, don't worry, a novel . . . we're like that, in France, we produce works of imagination based on reality . . . ”

The idea is in fact to see as many officials as possible.

As soon as I arrived, I asked to see everybody who had any knowledge of the case, from Musharraf to the fourteenth sergeant of the Lahore police force.

Your version, Sir?

What are your reasons for thinking that Omar might be an Indian agent?

Can you show me the transcripts of his interrogations? The Indians did—are you going to do less than the Indians?

Why don't you extradite him to the United States? Did they demand him as forcibly as they say they did? Which of you is the more reticent to extradite him?

So, I'm waiting for appointments. And while I wait quietly, I decide, again with Abdul, to revisit some of the obscure areas of my earlier investigations, particularly the very beginning, the point of departure—I decide, without really knowing why, to visit again the farm where the body of Daniel Pearl was found. I decide, in fact, to seek out a character whom the Pakistani press had talked about a great deal at first, but who seems to have been completely forgotten since: the owner of the land, the house, and the entire complex where the drama took place—the millionaire Saud Memon.

Who is Saud Memon?

Why do the terrorists end up there, at his house?

To what degree is he involved in the logistics of the crime?

And how come no one, either in Pakistan or anywhere else, seems to be interested in getting his testimony?

First surprise: Saud Memon is not to be found.

Access to Gulzar e-Hijri having been denied to me this time, I ask Abdul to take a casual look around—the place, he tells me, is in exactly the same state as when I was there in May. Neither Memon nor any other member of his family has reappeared since. The big house on the edge of the farm is empty, abandoned—shutters closed, big, rusty padlock on the iron gate, and the front garden overgrown.

Then, I obtain from the Sindh police headquarters the interrogation transcripts of Memon's brother-in-law, who teaches at the neighboring
madrasa
, and of his brothers—there are three—all arrested by the Rangers at the end of May, in their house in Nazimabad. None of them seems to have the vaguest idea where Saud could be now; despite the harsh methods I know are customary in these circumstances, nothing further has been extracted from them than “no, we know nothing, we haven't seen Saud since last May, maybe he's in Dubai, or Ryad, or Sanaa, or maybe even London, he has so many friends in the world, you know, so many friends . . . ” I have in front of me the statements made by all and sundry, as well as the text of the Supreme Court appeal lodged by Najama Mehmood, wife of one of the brothers, protesting the “illegal detention” of her husband— and I could be wrong, but I find in every single one of them a tone of sincerity in their way of protesting that the man has disappeared.

I go to Peshawar, a city of three and half million inhabitants connected to the famous tribal zones that are like a sieve between Pakistan and Afghanistan and which, for all practical purposes, elude the control of the central powers. I was told that Memon was hiding not far from there, in a
madrasa
in the province of North Waziristan. A professor from the
madrasa
next door to his home told Abdul: “This Pearl affair was an ordeal for him. Imagine! It all took place on the Memon clan's land, and therefore you could even say under his roof, so he's devastated. And because he's devastated, he wanted to get some distance, to forget, to be forgotten . . . ” But no one in Peshawar has the slightest idea of where he is. Nowhere did I find any evidence of his passage. Not a trace of the billionaire stricken with remorse and commending his soul to God, which is the idea that is being promoted. (Meanwhile, it's true that bin Laden himself seems to have succeeded in entering the city, in the second week of December 2001, with a guard of fifty men without, apparently, attracting the attention of the authorities.)

So here's a man about whom you can say, at the very least, that his name is known in Karachi. Here's a personage whose influence is great— the Memon clan, everyone assures me, rules a part of the Punjabi business world—and everyone knows of their comings and goings and what they're up to. Here's an entrepreneur who personally manages—as does Omar Sheikh's father—a clothing export company that is entirely aboveboard and that has a warehouse in another building at Gulzar e-Hijri, very close to the farmhouse where the murder took place. That man has disappeared. He has vanished into thin air with wives and children. He's faded into the scenery like one of the minor thugs: like Mussadiq and Abdul Samat, the two unidentified members of the detention cell; like Hyder, a.k.a. Mansur Hasnain, who made the last two telephone calls on the afternoon of the 23rd, and whose family, we recall, told the police that he had just been “infiltrated into the Jammu Kashmir”; like Arif, a.k.a. Hashim Qader, supposedly off to the Afghan front, leaving the household in Bahawalpur in mourning, bereaved . . .

Another surprise.

I'm in the office of one of the deputies of the Minister of the Interior of Sindh.

He is a tall man, vain, all uniform and moustache, who looks at me suspiciously and seems very concerned about the honor of his police force.

“Tell me, Mr. Chief of Police, about the famous antiterrorist operation conducted by your men last September 11, at the end of which you arrested ten Yemenis, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh. Tell me how the Rangers came to be outside the Defence building that morning. Tell me about the raid and the surrender of the terrorists. Tell me how all that was organized—did the Americans help you? Was it their agents who had tracked down Ramzi and his gang? Their satellite systems for intercepting and wiretapping? The CIA? FBI?

And him, vexed:

“Why always the Americans? Do you think we're not capable of conducting our own antiterrorist operations? As it happens, this affair had nothing to do with the CIA. It was Pakistani intelligence sources that did the preliminary groundwork. Here, listen . . . ”

And he tells me how everything started two days earlier in the Badurabad district when they broke up a fake-ID ring involved in the exfiltration of al-Qaida members. How, from there, they followed the trail of a smuggler who dealt not only in fake documents, but also in the export of illegal workers to Ryad—children from Dacca to be used as jockeys for the camel races of Dubai. He specialized, last but not least, in getting al-Qaida fighters out of the country to Yemen, and other countries of the Middle East. That man, the Minister's deputy told me, was the real target of the antiterrorist raid on the 11th—he's the one, even more than Ramzi bin al-Shibh or the flashy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that we wanted to capture; his name is “Mr. M.,” and Mr. M. is none other than . . . Saud Memon.

I realize that this version of events does not coincide with my thesis.

It exonerates, if I can put it that way, Yosri Fouda, the Al-Jazeera journalist, by making his interview—or at least the timing of its airing— no longer the catalyst for the Rangers' decision to conduct the raid.

It allows one to imagine, instead of the comedy I had envisioned, an investigation, a real one, with suspicion, witnesses, prolonged shadowing of the suspects, multiple phases, and at the end of the road, the final raid on the al-Qaida hideout.

But for the moment, that's not the crux of the matter.

The crux is that Memon, in all likelihood, is far from being an honest and naïve merchant whose good faith has been taken advantage of by a gang of terrorists squatting on one of his properties.

The important thing is that we have here a man with two faces, much more complex and mysterious than his peers in the Karachi Chamber of Commerce suspect. On one hand, the innocent importer-exporter of textiles, serving as cover—and on the other, a darker and more troubling character, which leads one to believe that it is not by chance nor unbeknownst to him that a gang of jihadists took up residence on his property to murder Daniel Pearl.

Need I add Abdul's discovery when he returned to the Gulzar e-Hijri farm? The property, like a number of its neighboring properties, had been bought fifteen years earlier, taking advantage of legislation that allows tax breaks for “industrial and commercial profits reinvested into agriculture.” Except that not the slightest sign of an agricultural project was ever seen there. Agricultural activity on the property, according to witnesses, never went beyond the bamboo and acacias that grew wild. And Memon seems to have become very quickly involved in other, infinitely less legitimate, missions. Starting with this one, in fact, long before Pearl: serving kidnappers and hosting prisoners in need of a prison.
Specialité de la maison.
Premises for rent, furnished and equipped, for needy jihadists. Memon as a dealer in abduction. Amateurs need not apply. A millionaire at the heart of the Islamist murder industry in Karachi.

And the third and last surprise: the al-Rashid Trust, of which Memon is one of the administrators, and which is tied to the property, although I don't know from what angle.

In theory, it's quite clear.

Al-Rashid is a Pakistani organization that has taken on the task of helping Muslims in need all over the world.