Probe IDs Pearl Abductor

Terrorist's Aliases Had Role In Luring Journal Reporter

by John Donnelly
The Boston Globe
February 7, 2002

KARACHI, Pakistan - When Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl attempted in January to find a radical Muslim preacher for a story on alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid, he located a man who described himself as an associate of the religious leader.

But, investigators now believe, the man was no associate - he was Sheikh Omar Saeed, a terrorist named by Pakistani police yesterday as the mastermind behind Pearl's kidnapping.

Investigators yesterday intensified their focus on trying to catch Saeed, who has been linked to Al Qaeda and previously had served five years in an Indian jail for the kidnapping of four Western tourists. Saeed has a history of using aliases to attract Westerners, police said. "There was an innocence about Daniel," said Jameel Yusuf, chief of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, which fights crimes such as kidnapping. "It could happen to anybody, but he was gullible in this case."

A senior Karachi police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Saeed's fake identity as someone close to Sheikh Mubarik Ali Gilani gave him a clever cover, and sent police in the wrong direction for more than a week.

"This game suited them perfectly," the police official said. "For one week, the concern was all Gilani, so we lost eight or nine days in the stupid exercise."

Pearl was kidnapped on Jan. 23 after going to meet a supposed intermediary with Gilani at a downtown Karachi restaurant called Village Garden. The man, who identified himself as Imtiaz Siddiqui, had called Pearl twice on his mobile phone an hour before the meeting to make sure he would appear.

The foreign correspondent had been led to Siddiqui by an Islamabad contact identified as Bashir Ahmad Shabbir. Police have said that the two names were fake. Yesterday, they said one of them was Saeed.

Police said last night they were close to finding Saeed and at least two other men who are holding Pearl, who was taken two weeks ago. The last authentic e-mail correspondence about Pearl arrived one week ago. Police believe he is alive.

"We are making significant progress to recover him," Saed Kamal Shah, Sindh Province's inspector general, said at the Karachi airport after returning last night from Islamabad, where he updated the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, on the case. "We are getting very close."

Asked if it would take only hours to find Pearl, Shah said, "It will take a little longer than hours."

A big break came Tuesday when FBI agents were able to trace two e-mails that contained messages from the kidnappers and photographs of Pearl to accounts belonging to two or three men, police said. Within hours, police claimed, the suspects said that Saeed gave them the e-mails.

Later Tuesday, police raided homes belonging to Saeed's family in Lahore and Karachi and arrested "about 10 cousins and aunties," said the senior police officer. "We're still looking for his wife and son. We want to get his son no matter how small he is, and get his wife. We will achieve that."

The psychology of arresting family members, the official said, was to increase pressure on Saeed to release Pearl unharmed.

Saeed, believed to be 34, was physically described by police only as wearing a long beard and being heavyset. They declined to release a photograph of him. "What for?" said the police official. "So he can shave off his beard?"

He is one of the leaders of the Islamic militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad, which was put on the US State Department's list of terrorist groups late last year, then banned by Musharraf on Jan. 12.

According to Pakistani and Indian law enforcement officials, Saeed, the son of a wealthy London cloth merchant, was first introduced to militant Islamic thought in the early 1990s, when he traveled to Bosnia as part of a charity group called Caravan of Mercy.

Saeed, a British citizen of Pakistani descent and former student at the London School of Economics, found that the Bosnia experience dramatically changed him.

He delivered blankets, food, and medicines to the needy, and also met many other Muslims who encouraged him to fight on behalf of Muslims around the world. He traveled to Pakistan, and then went for arms training in 1994 at a camp in Khost, Afghanistan, for 42 days, Indian intelligence officials said.

In 1994, he traveled to India, and using aliases such as Khaleed, Amir, and Waseem, befriended foreigners. He kidnapped four tourists in an attempt to free jailed Kashmir activist Masood Azhar, but was arrested soon after and served five years in an Indian jail.

He was one of three men freed in 1999 in a swap of hostages aboard an airliner that landed in Kandahar, Afghanistan. After landing in Kandahar, according to Indian officials, Saeed met with senior Taliban and Al Qaeda officials. For the last two years he carried out unspecified work for Al Qaeda in Pakistan, the officials said.

The senior Karachi police official said Saeed was in hiding while in Pakistan. He could not explain, however, how police found the homes of his relatives in a matter of a few hours.

John Donnelly can be reached by email at donnelly@globe.com.

Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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