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More questions over Pearl's killer
By B Raman
"Last Thursday, a
senior White House official called Mariane Pearl and
Paul Steiger, the managing editor of the Wall Street
Journal, to report a new, key development in the
investigation into the death of Mariane's husband,
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. 'We have now established
enough links and credible evidence to think that Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed' - the mastermind behind the September
11 attacks - 'was involved in your husband's murder',"
the official told Mariane.
"What do you mean
'involved'?" Mariane asked.
"We think he
committed the actual murder."
So says a
sensational article on the kidnapping and murder of
Daniel Pearl, a US journalist, written by Asra Q Nomani,
a freelance journalist, then living in Karachi, in whose
house Pearl and his wife Mariane had stayed when Pearl
went on his ill-fated trip to Karachi from Mumbai last
year to investigate a report that an e-mail which had
directed Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, to carry out his
operation to blow up an American aircraft had originated
from Karachi and that the e-mail had been sent by the
Jamaat-ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani organization with many
sleeper cells in the US, Canada and the West Indies,
including in the US armed forces.
In the year
2000, a mysterious web site calling for solidarity among
Muslims serving in the armed forces of the world
suddenly appeared and started registering such Muslims.
While it could not be definitively established as to who
was behind the site, police sources in Pakistan
suspected that the Fuqra cells in the US were
responsible. One does not know whether Pearl knew all
this when he arrived in Karachi, but his investigation,
for as yet unknown reasons, was focussed on the
background and activities of this organization and its
leaders.
In the hundreds of reports - open as
well as confidential - which have emanated from Pakistan
on his murder, the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM)
has not figured. The Pervez Musharraf regime initially
projected the murder as the work of the banned
Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which continues to be active
despite a so-called ban, and then the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
(LEJ), a banned Sunni extremist organization, and then
others.
Omar Sheikh, a British citizen of
Pakistani origin who had been working for the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) since the early 1990s
and who used to head the Lahore cell of al-Qaeda, was
ultimately blamed, along with some others. The appeal
filed by him against the death sentence awarded to him
by the anti-terrorism court and by the other accused
against their prison sentences have not been heard so
far. The hearing on the appeal is being repeatedly
postponed on some ground or the other.
Even as
the hearing in the anti-terrorism court was on, the
Pakistani media reported that the Pakistani authorities
had in custody some other suspects, including some
Yemeni-Balochis, who confessed to murdering Pearl. It
was also reported that it was on their confession that
the remains of Pearl were recovered by the Pakistani
authorities.
Under the law in most countries,
when material objects relating to a case are recovered
on the basis of a confessional statement of a suspect,
the confession is presumed to be correct unless proved
otherwise. Surprisingly, the Pakistani authorities did
not charge these new suspects with the murder of Pearl.
The anti-terrorism court, under pressure from the
Musharraf regime, refused to take cognizance of the
media reports in this connection and call for the
production of the new suspects before the court. It
accepted the denial of the state that any such
confession had been made.
While the belief that
it was a Yemeni-Balochi who had slit the throat of Pearl
before a video camera had surfaced before, none of the
reports so far had identified KSM as the man who did it.
The revelation of KSM's role, if correct, raises a host
of intriguing questions for which there are no answers
at present: Did the Yemeni-Balochi suspects, referred to
by the Pakistani media, speak about the role of KSM? If
so, did the Pakistani authorities tell the US about it?
Did Omar Sheikh mention KSM when he was in the informal
custody of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for
some days after his voluntary surrender to a retired
officer of the ISI, who was functioning as the home
secretary of Punjab in February last year? Did Omar
Sheikh tell the Karachi police about the role of KSM
when he was subsequently interrogated by them? Did KSM
tell the ISI about his role when it interrogated him for
some hours after his arrest at Rawalpindi in March last
before handing him over to the US authorities? Was KSM's
role independently known to the Pakistani authorities?
If so, up to what level? Did Musharraf himself know
about it? Was the US kept informed? If the Pakistani
authorities knew about it, why did they readily hand him
over to the US, whereas they have not only adamantly
refused to hand over Omar Sheikh, but even declined to
allow the British to independently interrogate him, as
reported by the Daily Times of Lahore?
There
have recently been a number of developments which
indicate that the US is probably tightening the screw on
Musharraf, while continuing to support him openly and
showering him with one assistance package after another.
The first was the premature declassification of a
document of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the
Pentagon, prepared shortly after September 11, which
speaks of the nexus between the ISI and al-Qaeda. The US
government could have legitimately rejected the
application under the Freedom of Information Act for the
declassification of this sensitive document on the
ground that this could damage the US's relations with
Pakistan. It chose not to do so.
The second was
the US Treasury Department orders of last week freezing
the accounts of the al-Alkhtar Trust of Pakistan and
Dawood Ibrahim, an Indian mafia leader, linked to
Pakistan. The order relating to the trust indicated that
it was funding anti-US jihad not only in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, but also in Iraq. The order against Dawood
spoke of his links with the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the
Lashkar-e-Toiba, which is a member of bin Laden's
International Islamic Front.
The US government
generally issues such orders only if it has its own
independent information. It does not act on the
information provided by others, unless corroborated by
its own intelligence agencies. While the orders do not
specify wherefrom it got the information, a careful
reading would indicate that the information came from a
senior operative of al-Qaeda, most probably KSM, though
he is not mentioned by name.
Why is the US now
bringing into the open secret information/findings
tending to cast doubts on Pakistan's dependability as an
ally in the "war against terrorism"? Is it to convey a
warning to Musharraf that if Pakistan continues to help
the Taliban against the Hamid Karzai government in
Afghanistan and sponsor anti-India terrorists, it won't
do him any good? It would be difficult to answer these
questions with conviction on the basis of the evidence
available till now.
An American academic, known
to be close to the State Department, recently said in an
interview on an Indian TV channel that while the US
continued to back Musharraf strongly, he would not rule
out the possibility of the US and Pakistan coming to a
parting of the ways one day if Pakistan's nexus with
jihadi terrorists continued.
Musharraf must be a
worried man.
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.
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