Pearl's Fatal Step Into A Web Of Islamic Militant Alliances

Cox News Service
February 21, 2002

At 6:58 p.m. on Jan. 23, Daniel Pearl used his cell phone to call his wife, Marianne. He told her he was going to meet an Islamic leader he had been seeking for weeks.

About that time, Pearl was driven a short distance from a meeting with a Pakistani official to the Village Restaurant behind the Metropole Hotel in the heart of this free-wheeling city of 14 million people on the shores of the Arabian Sea.

His driver was the last person, outside of Pearl's kidnappers, to see the 39-year-old Wall Street Journal correspondent alive. Pearl was kidnapped about a half hour later and his death was confirmed by U.S. officials on Thursday. Pearl, 38, never entered the restaurant. Instead, he walked to the sidewalk in front of the Metropole to wait for a go-between, a man he knew only as Bashir, to pick him up and take him to meet Pir Mubarrak Ali Gillani, a cleric who in the 1990s headed a group that landed on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

But Bashir was no channel to Gillani, who is considered a minor figure in militant Islamic politics here. Rather, Bashir turned out to be Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, 27, who Pakistani authorities say has confessed to being the mastermind behind the abduction of Pearl.

Sheikh surrendered secretly _ almost immediately after Karachi police identified him as a key figure in the kidnapping _ to Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency on Feb. 3. Karachi police knew nothing of his surrender until Feb. 12.

Police then arrested Sheikh. But what happened during his week in the hands of the ISI has not been explained.

The silence on the part of Pakistani authorities has raised questions about whether Sheikh and his gang had links to officials in Pakistan's military and intelligence circles and that Sheikh was negotiating a deal in return for keeping silent on those links.

Shortly after his arrest, police say, Sheikh told them Pearl was alive. But later, in open court, Sheikh said Pearl had been killed trying to escape his captors, a conclusion that no one here accepted for certain until Thursday.

British-born and -educated and from a wealthy, prominent Pakistani family, Sheikh has figured in three major kidnappings that affected Pakistan, India and Afghanistan in the past eight years. Authorities consider him a central figure in one of Pakistan's most sophisticated terrorist groups.

But Pearl knew none of this on Sept. 23.

Pearl expected to be picked up at 7 sharp. But his contact, Bashir, never showed.

At 7:16, Bashir called Pearl to say he would not be coming by.

Instead, Bashir said, he was handing Pearl off to a man called Amjad Hussain Farooqui, also known as Imtiaz Siddiqui, who would pick up Pearl. Pakistani authorities say the man called Farooqui or Siddiqui _ both of which may be phony names _ called Pearl twice just before he is suspected of whisking Pearl off into the Karachi night, and to his death.

In late January, 13 e-mail messages purporting to be from Pearl's kidnappers were sent to several newspapers and other news agencies. The messages, the last of which were sent on Jan. 30, contained demands that the kidnappers said must be met to secure Pearl's release. But the authorities consider only two of those messages to be authentic and even those raise suspicions about the real purpose of the abduction.

Until Thursday at least, Pakistani authorities said they doubted almost everything Sheikh had said because he was providing conflicting information to confuse them.

According to investigators, Pearl abductors operated as part of a sophisticated gang of 9 or 10 professional kidnappers in four separate and independent cells.

This discrete structure prevented the members of any of the groups from providing information about the other cells and thwarted efforts to locate Pearl, officials say.

"It's a very professionally executed abduction," Pakistan's Interior Minister Moinud Din Haider said in a recent interview.

The unofficial version, swirling in and around the investigation and reported in at least one newspaper here, of why authorities made little progress in the case is that the kidnappers have strong ties inside Pakistan's intelligence services and are protected by those connections. That allegation, enhanced by Sheikh's secret surrender to Pakistan's intelligence high command, already has brought government reprisals against a Karachi newspaper that raised it.

The Wall Street Journal's India-based South Asia correspondent, Pearl showed up in Karachi as the United States bombed the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan. At the same time, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was reversing policy and cracking down hard on Islamic militants who for years held sway in Pakistan's intelligence services and its military.

The pre-Sept. 11 relationship between Pakistan and Taliban-led Afghanistan forged strong links between Pakistan's intelligence services and the Taliban militia and al-Qaida network. The intelligence services, powered by the militants, also played a leading role in shaping and executing Pakistan's aggressive policies in Kashmir and toward India.

Musharraf, who himself had propped up the Taliban, outlawed certain Islamic groups and rounded up more than 1,900 Islamic militants in the past three months.

Meanwhile, in the pursuit of a story, Pearl wanted to ask Gillani whether he knew and helped Londoner Richard Reid, the man accused of trying to blow up a Paris-to-Miami airliner by igniting explosives in his shoes. Pearl also was trying, without success he told one Pakistani, to trace e-mail messages reportedly sent to Reid from Internet cafes in Karachi.

Instead, Pearl fell easily into the hands of the kidnappers, who sought to use him in their fight against the government crackdown targeting Islamic militants. Pearl knew little or nothing about the men who tricked him by saying they could lead him to Gillani.

Sheikh has told investigators that the kidnapping of Pearl was a calculated strike, the opening shot, at Musharraf and his crackdown, according to published reports in Karachi, which investigators have confirmed.

The alleged mastermind of the plot to kidnap Pearl, Sheikh was freed in 1999 from an Indian prison where he had been held for five years for kidnapping four people, including one American, in New Delhi in 1994.

He later trained guerrillas in Afghanistan and met with Osama Bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, Pakistani authorities say.

Karachi police also are seeking Mansur Hasnain, alias Hyder, in the kidnapping of Pearl, although those names may be fictitious. Police believe Hasnain may know what happened to Pearl. Hasnain was involved in the hijacking of an Indian Airlines in December 1999 that resulted in the exchange that freed Sheikh and his associates.

Copyright 2002 Cox Enterprises, Inc.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.