Pakistan gets its man ... sort
of By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Two days after Pakistani officials
announced the death of Amjad Farooqi, the circumstances
surrounding the killing of the person who is being
billed as the country's most wanted man as well as a
senior al-Qaeda figure remain murky.
Farooqi had
been indicted in connection with the beheading of US
journalist Daniel Pearl in early 2002 and named by
President General Pervez Musharraf as a mastermind of
two bomb attacks against the president's motorcades in
December last year. Officials had published a picture of
Farooqi, with a reward of $330,000 for information
leading to his arrest.
The official version runs
something like this: Farooqi was tracked through his
mobile telephone to a hideout in Nawabshah, a town 170
miles north of the port city of Karachi. Security forces
surrounded the house and met heavy automatic gunfire
from within. During the firefight, Farooqi and two
others were killed, and three alleged accomplices were
arrested. According to official leaks, Farooqi might
have been close to Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan alleged
to be al-Qaeda's head of Pakistan operations, who could
now also have been arrested.
"Farooqi's
elimination is a crushing blow to the al-Qaeda network
in Pakistan because he was the man who had been
providing al-Qaeda terrorists with the manpower to carry
out attacks," a senior Pakistani security official was
quoted by the French news service Agence France-Presse
as saying.
Certainly, this is the view now
widely disseminated in the international media, and used
as proof that Musharraf is keeping up his side of the
bargain in hunting down al-Qaeda operatives in the US's
"war on terror".
However, extensive Asia Times
Online research throws up a different picture.
Before the "war on terror" was launched after
September 11, 2001 - when Musharraf threw in his lot
with the US - Farooqi was an impoverished foot soldier
in a jihadi organization. It is only in the past six
months that he has suddenly emerged as a "kingpin" and
super villain, with the source invariably being from the
official side.
Farooqi never got to tell his
side of the story. His last words, as he lay mortally
wounded, were, "Oh God, you are the only one who sees."
He then recited a few verses from the Koran and died.
Apart from a few paragraphs in the Punjab
police's "red book", Farooqi led a largely insignificant
life, until, overnight almost, he was elevated to being
close to Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, mastermind of the
September 11 attacks.
According to information
gathered by Asia Times Online from various sources,
including his native villagers, jihadi friends and
security files, Farooqi was born in the early 1970s in
Chak 487 GB. Tehsil Samoundri, District Faisalabad, to a
family that had migrated to Pakistan at independence in
1947 from Indian Punjab's Houshyarpur district.
Farooqi's childhood was passed in extreme
poverty, and in need of a better life his family sent
him to an uncle's home in Toba Tek Singh, where he
completed his intermediate studies. Amjad had three
brothers and three sisters. The most educated in the
family is brother Javaid Iqbal, a graduate who now runs
a private school. The other brothers are Fida Hussain,
28, and Amir, 22. The sisters, Zahida Parveen, Shahida
Parveen and Khalida Parveen, are all married in
different villages in Shiekupura and Faisalabad.
Farooqi married his maternal uncle's only
daughter, Shabana Kausar, six years ago. They have a
daughter. Shabana Kausar has lived at her
father-in-law's residence since October 2001, when the
US attacked Afghanistan. Since about that time, Farooqi
had been in hiding as he was wanted in connection with
the Pearl murder. Shabana Kausar has two brothers,
Shebaz and Aqlak.
Different sources in his
native town of Toba Tek Singh told Asia Times Online
that Farooqi collected funds for jihadis in the 1980s,
and he was known to have taken part in the Afghan jihad
against the Soviets in 1987. Later he made many visits
of Kashmir and Afghanistan, like thousands of other
jihadi foot soldiers. He was also associated with the
Harkatul Ansar (HA). The HA emerged from the
Harkat-i-Jihad-i-Islami, which was declared a terror
organization by the US in the 1990s. The HA is led by
Maulana Fazalur Rehman Khalil. Later he was thought to
have been in contact with the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), a
banned Pakistani outfit involved in sectarian killings.
Punjab police intelligence departments files
mention Farooqi as active with the LJ's commander,
Shakil Ahmed, who was later killed in a police encounter
near Wehyari (Punjab). Soon after Farooqi's name
appeared in these files, intelligence organizations,
including Inter-Services Intelligence and the
Intelligence Bureau, studied his files, but failed to
definitively link him to any organization. Several
called him a stand-alone operator.
Subsequently,
a high-profile official report allegedly based on
investigations from several intelligence sources
maintained that he was in contact with militants in
South Waziristan, and that he also acted as a go-between
for Khalid. The same report said that Farooqi was a
lieutenant of the founder of jihadi outfits in Pakistan,
Saifullah Akhtar, who was recently arrested in the
United Arab Emirates and handed over to Pakistan.
Along with his alleged connection with Pearl's
murder and the assassination attempts on Musharraf, in
which junior army officers were also said to be
involved, the heat was on Farooqi now.
Different
proxy intelligence networks informed the security
agencies about his presence in Faisalabad, Kamalia,
Karachi and Waziristan. In a matter of a few months,
about 50 raids were conducted to find him. According to
Criminal Investigation Department records, on January 11
this year a raid was conducted on Farooqi's
father-in-law's house, number 687/27 GB, Tehsil Kamalia
district, Toba Tek Singh. Six people were arrested,
including his brother-in-law Aqlak and cousin Attaul
Manan.
After this raid, there is no record of
any further ones, although police and security agencies
from time to time claimed that they were near to
arresting Farooqi. Asia Times Online reported on
September 28 that Farooqi was probably arrested some
months ago (In Pakistan, dead men tell no
tales).
Identity crisis According to Asia Times Online sources, Farooqi's
death did not play out as planned. The authorities
wanted to keep the encounter - which could well have
been staged - a secret until Musharraf returned from his
overseas visit to the US, at which time Farooqi's body
would be produced.
However, a Dubai-based
television channel broke the news of the encounter just
a few hours after it took place. The Ministry of
Information immediately intervened and ordered all
stations to remove the clip. But Reuters news agency had
already picked up the item and distributed it all over
the world, although quoting senior officials who would
not confirm Farooqi's death.
By Tuesday morning
the media were full of reports on Farooqi's death, and
the establishment reacted by releasing what it claimed
was Farooqi's computerized identity document. No one is
questioning that Farooqi is the one who was killed in
the shootout - it was him.
What is at issue is
the identity card shown to the media. A number of
significant details indicate that it could not have been
Farooqi's legitimate one - from the fonts used in its
design to the data it carried, and importantly, that it
was computerized - such cards only came into force after
Farooqi had been declared a wanted man. How, then, could
he have obtained an official ID? It appears that having
been forced into making a hasty announcement, the
establishment did a poor job on faking the ID.
In the end, though, the officials produced their
"high value" target, which pleases the US, and with the
murder of Pearl and the assassination attempts on
Musharraf pinned on Farooqi, awkward questions over
these issues can be laid to rest.
Remember
Farooqi's dying words," Oh God, you are the only one who
sees."
(Mohammed Tahir, editor of Weekly Wajood,
also contributed to this report.)
Syed
Saleem Shahzad, Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times
Online. He can be reached at
saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
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