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Khalid capture: Truths and half
truths
By B Raman
United
States officials and the army of so-called
counter-terrorism experts which sprang up after
September 11 are projecting Khalid Shaikh Mohammad as
the Field Marshal Montgomery or General Patton of
al-Qaeda. But his case is getting more and more complex
and mystifying - just like the earlier case involving
the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, a US
journalist, last year.
Remember the case of
Pearl? Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
claimed to have solved the case, without recovering the
body, and prosecuted Sheikh Omar and his accomplices.
The court was told that they were the only plotters who
deserved to be convicted and sentenced to death.
Even as the trial was midway through, Pakistani
security agencies, while investigating another case,
fell on a group of some other terrorists belonging to
the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
(International). During interrogation, they surprised
the Pakistani and US intelligence agencies by claiming
that it was they who had killed Pearl. They led the
police to a spot on the outskirts of Karachi where the
remains of Pearl were found buried. Forensic tests
confirmed them to be those of Pearl, and they were
subsequently handed over to his widow.
Under
Pakistani law, when a confession made by a suspect leads
to some material recovery, such as a murder weapon or a
body, there is an automatic presumption that the entire
confession is correct. So, if the Pakistani and US
agencies had followed the due process of law, they
should have withdrawn the Pearl case from the court,
reinvestigated it and submitted a fresh charge sheet.
They did nothing of the sort. Instead, they kept
away from the court the information about the recovery
of the remains of Pearl and the arrests of new suspects.
When the defense counsel for Sheikh Omar asked the court
to take cognizance of the media reports in this regard
and order a reinvestigation, it declined to do so. It
sentenced Sheikh Omar to death and the other accused to
life imprisonment. The appeals filed by them have not
yet been disposed of because Pakistani officials have
not yet been able to sort out the confusion created by
the recovery of the remains of Pearl on information
provided by some terrorists who had not been prosecuted
in the case.
On March 1, a joint team of ISI and
US intelligence agents raided a house in Rawalpindi in
an area where many retired officers of the army and the
ISI live, and arrested three persons, one of them a
Pakistani. One of the arrested persons was identified as
Khalid, and he was handed over to the US intelligence
officials who flew him to the US naval base on Diego
Garcia, where a secret detention center has been
functioning since March last year, away from the prying
eyes of the media and international human rights
organizations.
US officials and the Arthur
Koestlers of the war on terrorism went to town with
fanciful accounts of what a great catch it was, what a
spectacular success for the US and Pakistani agencies,
etc. One ex-Central Intelligence Agency official even
claimed that it was the greatest arrest ever made in the
fight against terrorism since World War II. Khalid was
made into a legend just as they had made Osama bin Laden
into one after September 11. They had earlier projected
bin Laden as if he was one of those innumerable gods in
Hindu mythology with 10 heads, 20 arms and 20 legs,
present anywhere and everywhere. A similar god was
created in the personage of Khalid.
But even as
this legend was filling up media space, the Pakistani
authorities did an amazing volte face within 24
hours and denied that Khalid had been taken out of
Pakistan. He was, they said, being interrogated in
Pakistani territory by Pakistani officials. Faisal Saleh
Hayat, Pakistan's Interior Minister, even denied that
the US had requested his extradition. He added that
Khalid would first be tried in Pakistan for offenses in
which he was suspected before considering his
extradition. He made the confusion worse by saying that
since Khalid is a Kuwaiti national, if he were
extradited at all it would be to Kuwait and not to the
US.
Why this confusion? No credible answer is
available. As generally happens, there is speculation
galore in Pakistan, uncorroborated by evidence. Among
such speculations are:
When the Americans took Khalid to Diego Garcia, they
realized that there had been a wrong identification.
They handed him back to the ISI and asked it to handle
the mess as best as it could.
An official of the ISI brought to the notice of his
seniors that after the encounter in Karachi on September
11, 2002, in which Ramzi Binalshibh was captured, the
officer in charge of that raid submitted a report to the
headquarters claiming to have killed Khalid and buried
his body without informing the Americans about it
(See A
chilling inheritance of terror, Asia Times Online,
October 30, 2002).
The defense counsel of Sheikh Omar has drawn the
attention of the appeals court to reports in the foreign
media that it was Khalid who masterminded the kidnapping
and murder of Pearl, and pointed out that handing him
over to the US without trying him in Pakistan vitiated
the case against his client.
Pakistani officials
have further tied themselves in knots by stating that
Khalid is in their custody. If so, his friends and
relatives are entitled to move a writ of habeas
corpus for producing him before a court. Officials
of the Jamaat-e-Islami have already announced their
intention to do so, and the ISI has been trying
frantically to pressurize them not to do so.
The
Pakistani Supreme Court, while pronouncing judgement in
a different case on March 3, has added to the confusion
by ruling that al-Qaeda is not a terrorist organization
under Pakistani laws since the Musharraf government has
not so far declared it to be so. On August 14, 2001,
President General Pervez Musharraf declared the
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Shi'ite extremist Sipah
Mohammad as terrorist organizations.
On January
15, 2002, he added the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the
Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the
Tehrik Jaffria Pakistan and an organization active in
the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas to this list.
But, till today, he has not declared al-Qaeda, the
Taliban, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami as terrorist organizations.
The Supreme Court has ruled that al-Qaeda could not be
called a terrorist organization in Pakistan until the
government issued a notification under the Anti
Terrorist Act of 1997 to declare it to be so.
What has been happening in Pakistan would make a
good case study of how not to wage a war on terrorism.
B Raman is Additional Secretary (ret),
Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and presently
director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
(©2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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