Who Killed Daniel Pearl (24 page)

“I was arrested at my residence on the night of 30 April 2002 by Inspectors Hafiz Junejo and Fayaz Junejo from the Civil Lines police station in Karachi. The two inspectors were following orders from Police Superintendent Zulfiqar Junejo. I was detained for ten days in a cell on the third floor of the CID, the Central Investigations Department.”

The CID, Khawaja informs me, is a state agency, although it's related to the police. This man, whose confession we have before our eyes, though it doesn't say what crime he was detained for, nonetheless makes it clear that he is in the hands of the true invisible power of this country. Khawaja returns to reading the statement.

“After ten days of detention, I saw a husky individual with a beard and a swarthy complexion in the cell next to mine. He had a blindfold over his eyes. When they took it off, I immediately recognized Fazal Karim, Omar's chauffeur, an employee of the Al-Rashid Trust.”

The attorney then explains: Fazal is Saud Memon's chauffeur, not Omar's. Memon is one of the administrators of the Al-Rashid Trust, which is a Muslim charity organisation whose offices are near the Super Highway, close to the farm where Daniel Pearl was buried. But no matter, you already know that. Let's continue:

“Fazal Karim is a Mujahid, a holy warrior, a veteran. I immediately saw that he had been brutally tortured.”

In Karachi, terrible stories circulate about the gamut of tortures practiced by certain branches of the ISI. They talk about sophisticated variations on the bathtub suffocation torture. They talk about men who have been hung by their hands, a funnel placed between their teeth to force them to drink water until their stomach explodes. There's talk about electrodes attached to the toes, genitals burned or squeezed with copper wire, eyes gouged out or burned with a hot poker, heads plunged in bathtubs of boiling water, testicles squashed in a door and then cut. Is this the kind of treatment to which Saud Memon's chauffeur was subjected? Is that why he talked? Is it he, rather than the brilliant intelligence of the Sindh police investigating the attack at the Sheraton, who is responsible for the arrest of Bukhari and Chishti?

“I learned he was betrayed by Javed, the brother of Shireen Gul, the Madrasa Iqra's chauffeur who lives in the area known as Metroville. The police made a raid on Javed's place and he wasn't there, so they arrested his brother Shireen. After two days, the superintendent of the Nazimabad police station took Javed to the station and released his brother, Shireen Gul. After that, from the information they got from Javed, the police arrested Fazal Karim.”

This scenario makes me wonder. Why did this man Javed talk to the police? Under what circumstances? Under what kind of pressure? I imagine the terrible
danse macabre
of those tortured, and those threatened with torture. I picture all these men secretly incarcerated, just like modern versions of the Man in the Iron Mask while Omar, the only one accused, parades before the cameras at his trial. I can imagine the sweating faces in the cellars, blood flowing from wounds or spurting from between teeth, the bandaged heads, the cries and the moans, the shouts of the torturers and the trickle of confessions that, sooner or later, emerge.

“Fazal Karim, then, was held at the CID station for ten days. During his detention, he indicated where Daniel Pearl's body was buried. The CID agents handcuffed Fazal Karim and Javed. At night, they kept them in a pickup truck. They were afraid of a raid by the agents of the High Court, looking for Fazal Karim. After ten days, another agency took Fazal Karim away.”

The High Court against the ISI . . . One branch of the police against another . . . Better still, the courts against all the police . . . If the man from “Security Cell 19” is telling the truth, it confirms that there are two antagonistic forces in Musharraf's Pakistan. And moreover, it confirms my hypothesis: there are those who want the truth about the kidnapping, and those who do not; there are those who are ready to see justice done, and those who prefer that important secrets be silenced. The author of the letter drives the point home.

“On 22 May, CID Inspectors Mazhar and Fayaz came to get me. I was detained at the Saddar police station. I saw Fazal there too. His hands and feet were handcuffed. On 25 May, I was sent to the Orangi Town police station, in the district of Karachi, and from there they sent me to prison. For thirteen days, I saw Fazal Karim, we ate together and I talked to him. He told me many things. I can share this information with you.”

This gets more and more interesting . . . Here is a man who knows some “things.” He even knows “many” things. And he is willing to tell anyone about these “things.” But apparently, nobody wants him to. The letter made the rounds, Khawaja says. All the legal, military and police authorities in the country were aware of it, in one way or another. The judge even had it in his file several weeks before the verdict of 15 July. But nobody had the idea to go see Mazharul Hasan, son of Mohammed Sadiq, to listen to what Fazal Karim told him in the cell they shared.

“A police commissioner and Inspector Fayaz (the one who, with agent Hafiz, discovered Daniel Pearl's body and was promoted after Fazal Karim's arrest) told me they had encountered Faiz Bhatti and Rehman Bukhari.”

Who is Faiz Bhatti? Khawaja has no idea. But he knows, as we all do, who Bukhari is—the Yemeni's man, the one who ordered Karim to hold Pearl's head and who was present, then, at the execution . . .

“What do you think of this document?” Khawaja concludes. “What do you think of our methods of justice? And do you have any doubts left about how bizarre this trial is?”

I spend about two hours discussing the whole thing with Khawaja.

He gives me a piece of information that I remember already having read, but that was immediately buried, as usual, beneath a cascade of denials: Omar, realizing that things were going badly, called Hyder, the chief of cell 3, the detention cell, at the last minute, to tell him to free the prisoner (in the coded language they had agreed on, “shift the patient to the doctor”). But Hyder allegedly told him it was too late, that Danny was already dead, filmed, and buried (in code, “Dad has expired; we have done the scan and completed the X-rays and the postmortem”).

“Don't you find that astounding?” Khawaja rages. “Don't you think that changes everything? I'm not Omar's lawyer, but all the same, isn't that one hell of an extenuating circumstance? And if it isn't Omar any more, who made the decision about the execution? Huh, who? And why? All of this is much, much less simple than the way the papers tell it.”

He also talks about the more general problems of Pakistani justice, as he sees it: ignoring habeas corpus, lack of respect for human rights in prisons, persistent rumors of the presence of FBI agents in the Pakistani antiterrorist units. “No, no, there's no doubt about it. We have very precise reports. They were there, for example, when they arrested Bukhari— and by the way, no one has seen him alive since Mazharul Hasan wrote that letter I read to you . . . The Americans shouldn't—they signed the 1984 treaty abolishing torture, they're a country that supports human rights. How can they be accomplices of these commando operations, all these things that are offensive to democracy? Tell them: Through this policy they're feeding the growing hatred against them . . . ”

He's passionate. Voluble. He has an air of the plump and prosperous about him, at odds with the image he'd like to project of the advocate of the poor and the oppressed. But he's likable, open. Once we get to talking, establishing some confidence, I find he has a side that's almost more aesthetic than militant—an artist of law, an acrobat of procedure and hypothesis, juggling texts and presumptions. And the truth is, I rapidly realize, his suspicions go beyond the question of “detained but not indicted.” The truth is, he finds the whole story, from day one, bizarre, even more bizarre, he finally confides in me, more complex, more confusing than both the newspaper articles I've found and the statement of the man in cell 19 would lead one to believe.

So let's go back to the statement, he says.

Without a doubt, the man saw Fazal, and Fazal is in prison.

“The police are saying: ‘Fazal doesn't exist. The man who took us to the grave of Daniel Pearl on 17 May was a special informer.' Fine. I'm all for it. The only problem—you don't know it, but I'm telling you now— is that Fazal is the one who, the day he took them to the grave, gave them the chip from Daniel Pearl's mobile phone. And there's something else that casts doubt on this story about a ‘special informer.' Let's assume for a moment that he indeed exists. Why would he have waited this long to come forward? And especially, why wouldn't he have gone to the Americans, who, remember, were offering five million dollars and safe conduct to the United States for the information? No, it doesn't hold water. The story about the ‘special informer' doesn't make any sense. So we have to take it as an established fact that it was, actually, Fazal who, once arrested, took the police to the burial place.”

However, there's room for uncertainty about what happened next, continues Khawaja, and we can imagine some contradictory hypotheses. Especially, he suggests, leaning towards me, eyes shining, like a sly, mischievous conspirator, if we consider the point that seems to have intrigued you the most just now when I was translating the document, and which is, in fact, the most problematic. Which one? Can't you tell? The point that isn't all that certain, the one I take with a good deal of caution, the one that makes me wonder if this could be a source of misinformation, is—he gestures like a magician taking a rabbit out of a top hat—torture!

“What do you mean, torture?” I say. “Karim wasn't tortured?”

“I don't know,” he says, suddenly embarrassed, as though the fact that he doesn't know is a real problem for him. “I'm not saying he wasn't. But I'm saying I don't know, that I haven't found any evidence or rather, if he really was, it was in a strange place, by strange people, not the usual ones. I looked into things, you know, I did my own investigation. Fazal was arrested and interrogated in a mosque in Nazimabad, a fundamentalist part of town, which is already out of the ordinary. And, as for torture, there are as many signs indicating that it has occurred as not. If you like, I'm not excluding the possibility that this document was partially manipulated, that an entire scenario was worked out to convince the man in cell 19 that Fazal had been tortured when, in fact, he had not.”

“Why?” I say, stunned. “Manipulated? To what end?”

He hesitates, looks at me as though he were sizing up my capacity to comprehend the extremely subtle things he is about to tell me—and starts to sketch a theory that I summarize here.

We can imagine anything, he begins, a crafty expression in his eyes.

We can say: Fazal was atrociously tortured so that he would confess to a crime he really committed and take the police to the grave, etc. Except, the argument that is valid for the “special informer” is equally valid for him—why would he wait until he was arrested? In his place, wouldn't you or I have gone directly to the Americans? Double play! You avoid torture, and you end up with five million dollars in your pocket!

Or, we can try a slightly different version: Yes, Fazal was tortured. The man in cell 19 saw what he saw. But all that was to make him confess to a crime that, on the contrary, he had not committed. And it is precisely for that reason, because he did not commit the crime, that they had to torture him so. The point of the maneuver was to cover and exonerate far more important people than Fazal. The whole operation consisted of making him, voluntarily or by force, take the responsibility for someone else's crime.

And then, finally, we can also theorize that he was not tortured at all, that the man in cell 19 was deceived about this, and that the entire scenario was concocted to cover for the fact that they had withheld information that was actually in their possession from the very beginning. You have to recall the atmosphere at the time, he insists. The Pearl family protests. International pressure mounts. One way or another, they had to make some concessions. And they just wanted a way to get out of the situation and say, “That's it! Eureka! We found the body!” When in reality, they had always known where it was.

Khawaja stops. All of a sudden, he's somewhere else. I'm worn out, almost out of breath from the flurry of his hypotheses. But he is calm. Thoughtful. He seems to be questioning his files, gazing at them, the way others might consult the stars.

“There's something else,” he begins again. “The Lashkar . . . The fact that Fazal, Bukhari, Chishti, Lahori, in fact, all those rounded up in the latest arrests belonged to the Lashkar . . . The fact that, all of a sudden, everyone mentions only the Lashkar . . . And why do you suppose that is, hmm? Why this sudden wish to take the spotlight off Harkat ul-Mujahideen and Harkat ul-Jihad and shine it on Lashkar i-Janghvi, the party of Fazal and Bukhari? For you Westerners, they're all one and the same. It's all the same big, nebulous, Islamic terrorist network, and you don't see any point in differentiating between one and another. But there is a difference . . . ”

He clicks on the mouse of his computer to print out a page, which he hands to me: it's a chart, with squares and arrows and different colors, outlining the topology of jihadist groups in Pakistan. Who's who? Who's tied to whom? How are they influenced, controlled, financed?