Who Killed Daniel Pearl (4 page)

The same abandoned garden, full of insects, and the odors of jasmine mixed with those of the pestilent trench. A kind of outdoor bathtub that must have served as a water reservoir and is probably now used by the police when they pass.

And as for the room itself, it's the same cement floor blotched with wax and soot showing where candles and lanterns were placed. The same thick, cement-brick walls, a badly washed brown blood stain on one of them; a handful of hair; a transom facing the road and closed by a metal shutter that was then boarded over; a wooden door without keyhole or handle, barred with a beam slid through padlocked iron rings; construction material in a corner; fishing nets; clumps of straw mixed with mud; mattress stuffing with spider webs; old clay pots thrown in a corner under the transom; colonies of red ants; cockroaches; two discarded spoons and a plate; a candy-pink alarm clock with just one hand; crumpled cigarette packs; a cold brazier; a bed made of cords.

This is Daniel Pearl's prison.

This is the scene of his martyrdom, his tomb.

I remain there for an hour, letting the silence of the place slowly penetrate me, forever, in this terrible setting of the ordeal of the ten times sundered. And inside me, a feeling of friendship moves me to tears—for a man who was ordinary and exemplary, normal and admirable, who found here his last point of contact with life.

CHAPTER 3
A MYSTERIOUS SMILE

In the photos of Pearl taken by his captors in the place where he was held hostage, which have been kept at the British consulate in Karachi, there is a very strange detail.

I'm not referring to the photos everyone knows about, which went around the world when the kidnappers sent them by e-mail to the editors of various outlets of the international press.

I'm not talking about the one, for instance, in which he's sitting on an old car-seat, his head on his lap, his hair tousled, with a gun just inches from his temple.

I'm not talking about the photo that is almost the same, where the gun has come even closer and the man holding it has grabbed Pearl's hair with his other hand to push his head down even farther. In the foreground, his chained wrists, another chain on his ankles. His body is curled up into a ball. You can sense weariness, despair, fear.

I'm not talking about the third one either, probably part of the same series, in which he has straightened up and, still against the same blue background, which is probably a sheet hung up to preclude identification of the wall and the house, he's looking at the camera. His hair has been combed. He has pulled himself together, but his eyes are out of focus, the lower part of his face is swollen. He is pale with the pallor your skin gets in prison. He looks as if he's been drugged, or beaten. (In my opinion these three pictures were taken the day he tried to escape; or maybe the next day when he tried again, during his walk; or maybe the day when a student from the
madrasa
next door came and knocked on the farm door, and Pearl started calling for help, screaming like a lunatic—not the kind of stuff, of course, his kidnappers appreciate . . . )

No, I'm thinking about two other photos that as far as I know weren't published in the international press, which were taken the next day—the day before his execution.

In one, he is holding a copy of
Dawn
, the big Karachi daily, in order to date the photo and prove that the captive is still alive. He looks calm. His hair is tidy, freshly cut like a child's. On his parted lips a faint smile lingers. His clear gaze faces the camera. His chains have been removed and he is holding the paper in both hands, steadily, just in the right spot so that neither photo nor headline is concealed. On that face, on that body—with control seemingly regained over his expression, the look in his eyes, and his posture—I can detect no trace of fear or anxiety.

The other is even more surprising. The same newspaper is behind him. Except this time they must have taped it to the dark blue fabric and so his hands are free. I can't see the fingers on the right hand, hidden beyond the top of the frame. But I do see his arm, upheld in a strange gesture that could be triumphant, or saying goodbye, or obscene. As for the fingers of his other hand, they're hidden by his thigh and invisible to the jailers standing on his left—but if you look closely, particularly at the position of the ring finger, which seems to me to be slightly stiffened and pulled back from the other fingers, I have the distinct impression that he is discreetly miming a “Fuck you!” visible only to us, who will receive this image. Is Pearl joking? “V” for victory on one hand . . . “Fuck you” on the other . . . Is he sending us a message, and what is it? One thing is unmistakable. It's his mischievous, almost joyous face. It's that perfectly relaxed smile. It's that hair standing up, as if in flames. It's that relaxed, almost nonchalant stance. At that point, he's been a prisoner for six days. He's somewhere deep inside Karachi in a squalid room of only a few square feet. He's in the hands of men he obviously realizes are not only Islamists but killers. His glasses have been taken away from him. They may have been broken. He's badly fed. According to the testimony of one of his guards, after hearing his kidnappers use the word “injection,” and fearing they were going to inject poison into his food, he even went on a hunger strike for two days, and started eating again only on the condition that one of his guards taste his sandwiches first. His hands have been tied, his legs chained. Now he's going to die in a few hours. And yet he has the relaxed look of a guy who decides, finally, that the situation he's in is interesting—he has the look you put on when you want to reassure your loved ones, or when you have good reason not to worry.

There are other mysteries, many other mysteries, which I won't elucidate, in the Pearl affair.

There's the police report, for instance, that I read in Karachi, in which Fazal, who doesn't speak English but understands it, testified that on the very last day he saw one of the Yemenis who had come to kill Pearl go up to him, and talk to him in a language which Fazal could not understand—and Pearl's face lit up, then clouded over again, and then he gave a long answer, shouting, in the same language. What language, then? French? Hebrew? Those were the two other languages Pearl spoke. But a Yemeni speaking French . . . or Hebrew. . . And saying what? How very strange.

There are all those images that present other kinds of problems to the investigators, to the forensic labs in Lahore and other places, and now, to the writer—starting, of course, with the famous video sent by the kidnappers, after the execution, to the American consulate in Karachi and which I watched, and watched again. Why doesn't Pearl struggle more when the hand with the long knife enters the frame? Why don't you see the blood flow? Why does his face, in the last phase of the throat slitting, already have that corpse-like rigidity? When the other hand comes from behind, grabs hold of his head, does it again to get a better grip, and when the fingers leave a sallow imprint on the forehead, visible in the picture, isn't that proof that the blood has stopped flowing and Pearl is already dead when he is being decapitated? Another hypothesis: Was Pearl drugged? Has he, like Bataille's ecstatic Chinese youth, been injected with a dose of opium before being decapitated? Or should we believe the testimony of the man who led investigators to Pearl's grave, Fazal Karim, when he says: “We had a problem with the camera. We noticed at the last minute that the cassette had jammed. We had to start all over again. We were halfway done and the head was almost completely severed. We had to put the knife back into the cut and redo the whole scene.”

But here's the first mystery.

Here is the thing I've been thinking about since I found those two photos.

Pearl, when they were taken, is confident.

There must have been a particularly difficult moment the day before, when the first series of photos were taken. Surely he must have smelled, at least on arrival, the odor of catastrophe. But my feeling is that, on that day when these last two photos were taken, everything had more or less fallen into place: He doesn't believe he's going to be killed. It's as if the idea hasn't even occurred to him. He's looking at his executioners—but he's looking at them as if he were fascinated rather than troubled by what is happening to him.

Is he naïve?

Does he live—as do most of the journalists I know and as I do whenever I take on this occupation—with a magical belief that he is intrinsically invulnerable?

Did the killers reassure him, and have they themselves at that point decided to let him live?

Is it the same kind of moment of “disquiet, uncertainty and indecision” noted by Leonardo Sciascia in his description of the long ordeal of Aldo Moro, kidnapped and murdered by those 1970s fundamentalists, the Italian Red Brigades?

In all situations of this kind, does there invariably come a moment— and is it the reason for what we see in the pictures—of vagueness and perhaps compassion, which in Moro's case occurred on 15 April 1978, when the Brigade sent their famous “Communiqué Number 6,” declaring, “The time has come to make a choice”?

Had the kidnappers reassured Pearl? Did they tell him, “Don't worry, you are our guest, the negotiations are going on”? Did they give him books, a Koran, a chessboard, cards?

Contrary to what the Western press has written, I believe that the execution and its videotaping were not necessarily planned, and may have become imperative at a particular point during his captivity, for reasons we do not know.

My theory is that for the time being, between Pearl and his killers, between the great journalist—liberal, tolerant, open to the cultures of the world and a friend to Islam—and the jihadists, a relationship has formed of trust, of near complicity, and understanding.

I am convinced that what happened was the same kind of phenomenon that Sciascia noted (I see, in fact, that Pearl in these photos has something of the same look that Moro had in the famous photo sent to the newspaper
La Repubblica
on 20 April, in which he too held up the previous day's paper)—“the daily familiarity which inevitably sets in” within the depths of the “people's prison,” the “exchange of words,” the “common partaking of food,” this symbolic sharing. The game involving “the prisoner's sleep” and “the guard's watch,” the care they must take of the “health” of the man they have “condemned to death.” These “trivial gestures,” these “words” that they “inadvertently” say to each other, but that “emanate from the most profound movements of the soul.” The “eyes that meet at the most vulnerable moments,” the “unexpected exchange of spontaneous smiles”—all of these opportunities, day after day, “for jailer and prisoner, victim and executioner, to fraternize.”

Knowing him to be a relentless journalist, I'm ready to wager that he takes advantage of these few days to talk, make jokes, and, one thing leading to another, to finally ask the questions that have been on the tip of his tongue for weeks.

To be precise, let's say that there was the shock of the first day, his mind reeling, an instant of panic. But I'm sure the situation developed as it always does when journalists confront trouble: a moment of dread, yes, and then you get used to it, your reflexes return, you completely forget the danger. I am sure that he quickly came to his senses and that even in the shack where he had to sleep on a pallet, eat out of a mess tin, and put up with the cold, he never lost that devouring curiosity that now he had the opportunity to satisfy: Aren't these the very jihadists he's been trying to find since he arrived from Bombay? Isn't he observing them living their lives, going about their business, arguing, reacting to the news, praying? Doesn't he have entire days and nights to not only observe them but to question them, get them to confide in him, and understand them? Even better: What if he succeeded in solving the mystery of the notorious Gilani, the man he wanted to interview, and as we shall see, was obsessed by? What if that was the meaning of the raised arm in the last photo?

Something happened at that moment.

Something happened that made the kidnappers change their minds and send for three Yemenis, professionals in this kind of crime, with orders to execute him.

The question is, what? What exactly happened? At what exact moment during his captivity?

Did Omar Sheikh's men have a change of mood?

Was it—as Omar himself kept repeating with peculiar insistence from the very first day of his trial—that they could not, after thinking it over, forgive him his attempt to escape the day before?

Was there deliberation? A trial?

Was there an external event that turned things awry?

An accident?

An order from above, and why?

An interference, but what?

A collision of convictions, of which he became the victim?

That is the subject of this book.

It is the mystery that must be solved—its framework, the threads of its plot.

CHAPTER 4
MISE À MORT

What time is it?

Night?

Day?

The video doesn't say.

It doesn't appear on the Pakistani police report.

So, let's say it is at the end of the night.

Or, to be precise, daybreak, five A.M., just before the cock crows.