Inside the Mind of a Seductive Killer

by Jon Stock
The London Times
August 21, 2002

Omar Sheikh was found guilty of the brutal murder of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan last month. Briton Peter Gee shared a jail cell with him for 18 months and found Sheikh full of contradictions. He describes to our correspondent a man both charming and gentle, yet who was capable of great cruelty

When Omar Sheikh, a former British public schoolboy, was sentenced to death in Pakistan last month for masterminding the kidnap and savage murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, his growing reputation as one of the world’s most ruthless terrorists was seemingly complete.

Pearl, whose wife was pregnant, had been killed on camera, his throat slit with a knife. His dismembered body was later found in a shallow grave on the outskirts of Karachi. None of this seems to have bothered Sheikh, who smiled as the judge read out his sentence. Minutes later Sheikh issued a defiant message through his lawyer: “We will see who shall die first, either me or the authorities who have arranged this death sentence.”

For one man, though, Sheikh’s courtroom threat was little more than empty rhetoric.

Peter Gee, a 38-year old British musician, had heard it all before and didn’t believe a word of it. He did not believe that Sheikh was directly responsible for Pearl’s murder either. The Sheikh he thought he knew, beneath all the “macho bravado”, was a young and confused man who was torn by guilt and had serious misgivings about his first foray into terrorism, the kidnapping of three British backpackers and one American in India in 1994. He had even asked Gee to visit his British victims, who had been freed after two weeks, and apologise on his behalf.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, 28, is a chilling conundrum, full of contradictions. The model middle-class British citizen, who once received a bravery commendation from London Underground for rescuing a commuter from the track at Leytonstone station, had, within a few years become Osama bin Laden’s “favoured son”, who laughed when he demonstrated to four backpackers how he was going to cut off their heads.

“Omar was the kindest, most gentle person you could meet,” according to his brother Awais, a Cambridge law graduate.

Rhys Partridge, one of his backpacker victims, says: “He showed such contempt for the lives of others that it is difficult to show any different for his.”

Gee, like many of those who have come into contact with Sheikh, fell utterly under his spell. By a quirk of Indian bureaucracy, he spent more than a year in Sheikh’s close company between 1998 and 1999, when they were both in Tihar Jail in Delhi. “Mr Peter” and “Mr Omar”, as they were known, forged a deep friendship, thanks to the proximity of “O” and “P” in the alphabet, and to a mutual intellectual respect based on a shared British education. (Gee read history at Sussex University, Sheikh went to the London School of Economics.) As a result, Gee probably knows Sheikh better than most. They saw each other every day, often chatting for hours in the “foreigners’ ward”, and later in Jail Number Four’s dreaded, windowless “barracks”, where more than 100 people slept like sardines. They played Scrabble, gave geography lessons together to other prisoners and exchanged lengthy letters full of philosophical jousting. Then Sheikh was finally transferred to solitary confinement.

Gee’s insights are, therefore, both important and unprecedented — no Westerner in recent years has spent more time with Sheikh — but they are also tainted by the fact that Sheikh, the accomplished chess player, was almost certainly playing mind games with his British friend. He even joked once that he would have liked to have kidnapped Gee. Certainly none of Gee’s impressions square with the current media image of Sheikh as a hardline Islamic terrorist, which is why he says he has decided to talk.

But it is the mere fact that Gee is so ready to speak out for a man responsible for the dreadful murder of Daniel Pearl that shows us just how dangerous Sheikh really is.

Like many of the greatest monsters in history — from Hitler through to bin Laden — his cruelty and malice co-exist with a great intelligence and ability to enthrall those around him. Like others who do evil, he knows precisely how to gauge the effect he has on those around them.

It is this very intelligence, this talent at seduction — and, more surprisingly, a real sense of remorse — that makes Sheikh at once a more fascinating character and a more frightening one. His murder of Pearl, after all, was not the result just of religious fanaticism or spontaneous rage, but the killing of a decent man by one who could understand and even empathise with the victim’s sense of honour.

The full account of Omar Sheikh and his role in Pearl’s murder has not yet been told, and might never be, if Sheikh is executed. His recent trial added little to our understanding of the man. Held in secret, in a fortified court in Hyderabad, it was widely considered to be legally flawed, with a conspicuous lack of evidence. No murder weapon, no witnesses to the crime, not even a body until a month into the 13 week trial. Few, though, doubt that Sheikh was involved in Pearl’s kidnap in January, which makes his expressions of remorse ring hollow. It also leaves him with Pearl’s blood on his hands. But did he intend the American to die?

Even today, Gee believes he did not. I first heard of Gee’s unlikely friendship with Sheikh when the musician was released from Tihar jail in March 2000. Gee had been arrested at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi international airport in December 1997 and charged with possession of cannabis. He spent more than two years in jail awaiting trial before his case collapsed. Indian Customs were accused of framing Gee and and the courts acquitted him of all charges.

We met in Delhi shortly after his release, but he was nervous of saying too much about his terrorist friend, who had been sensationally released from Tihar jail three months earlier as part of a deal to end the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane stranded in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He did say, however, that Sheikh had expressed regret for what he had put his four kidnap victims through.

Those words came back to haunt me when the distressing details of Daniel Pearl’s abduction emerged earlier this year. They came back to haunt Gee, too. The former housing manager with Richmond Council in West London comes from an academic background. His father was a senior lecturer in economics at Dundee University, and his mother was a head teacher. He is intelligent and easy-going, and chose to spend his time in jail reading Dostoevsky, practising yoga and keeping fit.

As a character witness for Sheikh, though, he is not always impartial, looking for good in his friend when less credulous people might see only evil.

“I would be absolutely astonished if Omar was directly involved in the murder of Danny Pearl,” he says. “He told me that he had come to regret his duplicity towards those he kidnapped — he didn’t like the lying that was involved. He showed me his victims’ court statements. I had by this time developed a friendship and respect for Omar and it was upsetting to read a first-hand account of the ordeal that he had put these innocent people through.

“The statements contained names and UK addresses, and he asked me to visit the three Britons to apologise on his behalf.”

However, Sheikh was released before Gee, who “left him to make his own arrangements regarding apologies”.

Gee says there were other signs of regret during Sheikh’s solitary last days in Tihar. A representative from the British High Commission used to pay regular visits to the jail to check on British nationals, including Sheikh, and on one of these occasions Gee noticed a change in his friend.

“I asked him if he was suffering and he said yes, he was. I think he had begun to ask himself questions — have I done the right thing by God and my family? He spoke of how he had been eagerly awaiting a particular letter from his parents when it struck him that he was placing more importance on the arrival of this letter than on the word of God — the Koran — and that this was wrong.”

To be fair, Gee is under no illusion that Sheikh has long been a radical Muslim whose beliefs have turned him against the West. Sheikh spoke to him at length of his trip with a relief agency, Convoy of Mercy, to the Balkans in 1993, when he witnessed the persecution of fellow Muslims, and a visit the following year to the Khalid bin Waleed training camp in Afghanistan, where he learnt how to handle firearms. It was here that he first came into contact with the people who would help to set him on the path to kidnapping and terrorism. But he admitted that he had been “radicalised” years earlier because of bullying he was subjected to during his East London childhood, after his parents emigrated to Britain from Pakistan in 1968.

“Omar spoke of his childhood and of racism in the playground, of being rejected by his peer group, who used to call him a ‘Paki bastard’. It may seem strange to people to consider Omar as a deeply sensitive person, but these taunts hurt him deeply. Most sensitive people quickly withdraw from rejection, while others rage against it. Omar eventually chose the latter course.”

Gee also feels that Sheikh’s turbulent life has been governed by a need to belong and to be liked. When he was 13 his family moved back to Pakistan for several years (where he attended Aitchison College in Lahore, known as the “Eton of Pakistan”), before returning to London. The move to Pakistan was, apparently, at Sheikh’s request. “It was one of the first steps in a search for a sense of belonging that he had not found in England,” says Gee.

Ironically, it was as an inmate that Sheikh first began to feel genuinely wanted. From 1994 to 1998, he was kept in a Meerut jail in the central Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He discovered a talent for leadership and was soon in charge of the jail’s large Muslim population.

“According to Omar he lived practically like a mafia don. He was natural leadership material. His voice had a quiet, persuasive authority, and he had powerful eyes which could hold you in their gaze for as long as he thought necessary. He told me that he had to be wary of being seduced by the power and glamour that came with his position.”

Sheikh became leader of the radical Muslim inmates at Tihar, too, most of whom were from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Tales of his kidnap operation in 1994 can have only enhanced his reputation. The Indian armed police who stormed the kidnappers’ hideout spared him because they thought that he was one of the hostages. “A gun was pressed to his head by one of the rescuers,” says Gee, who heard the story firsthand. “Something inside told him that his time had not come, and he started speaking in perfect Queen’s English. It saved his life.”

Death, in fact, appears to have held no fear for Sheikh, who believed that it would have led directly to a “better place”. Gee questioned him at length about this. “The existence of this Heaven was equivalent to scientific fact for Omar — ‘as sure as eggs is eggs’, he used to say. I don’t believe that he feared death then, and I don’t believe he fears it now. We talked a lot about bravery, too. I told him that it did not require courage for him to run through a hail of bullets because he did not fear death.

“For Omar, true courage would have been directly to ask the girl at LSE to whom he was attracted whether she would have liked to go for a cup of coffee, rather than talking to her only through intermediaries.”

Such an attitude to death might be expected in an Islamic radical. Of more surprise, perhaps, was his sympathy for non-Muslims in jail. On one occasion, two Nigerians in the foreigners’ ward had been given a beating for possession of tobacco. (It was a regular punishment in Tihar, and involved tying the offender’s hands and feet to a pole suspended between two chairs; fellow convicts would then be forced to thrash them with bamboo sticks, under the supervision of prison officers.) Omar was appalled by their treatment and immediately organised a hunger strike.

But the hunger strike was a disaster, as one by one Sheikh’s followers feigned illness in order to be transferred to the hospital wing, where food was being served. “I spoke to some of these people and they freely admitted that they had faked their sickness,” says Gee.

It is a telling incident, revealing as much about Sheikh’s naivete as his beliefs. “His stance on the hunger strike was that of a principled Westerner,” Gee claims. “He told me that he admired the traditional British sense of honour and fair play.”

Pearl’s family, who buried Daniel ten days ago near his childhood home in California, might beg to differ. There was, after all, nothing principled, honourable or fair about the abduction of a tenacious Western reporter who was simply trying to understand, rather than stigmatise, the world of Islamic radicalism. Interestingly, Gee says that Sheikh was never once violent in jail, although he frequently talked about violence — which can sometimes be more frightening, reflective of a sober dedication to killing rather than a hot-headed temper. But for the most part he chose to play Scrabble and chess, another pastime he had excelled in as a youth. He did, however, threaten to have a prison officer executed after Sheikh had organised a boycott among Indian Muslims of a daily nationalistic Indian prayer (“Jai Hind!” ).

“It was an empty threat which was not, and could not, be carried out,” Gee says. “I remembered it when I read of Omar’s threat at the end of his recent trial. He is not averse to playing to the gallery.

“Quite a lot of it with Omar is macho bravado.”

Gee admits that he is now concerned for his friend. “When he was isolated, he was forced into a more self-questioning attitude and was just beginning to grow up,” Gee says. “I don’t know whether the suffering and maturing continued, or whether he relapsed into the comfortable certainties that he had enjoyed before.”

Could he, then, have been the mastermind behind Pearl’s death, as the court in Hyderabad found?

Gee still believes that Sheikh could not be responsible for Pearl’s death, although even he cannot deny that a man so obsessed with control as Sheikh could not have allowed Pearl’s murder to be a result of confusion. “He would have had to regress quite a long way if he was involved directly with Pearl’s death,” Gee suggests.

“It’s possible that he might have been reradicalised by September 11.”

Gee’s insights into Sheikh — who is now appealing against his death sentence — will not be of much consolation to Pearl’s family, but they might help the West to understand the sort of person that history has often warned us against.

Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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