DANIEL PEARL: Lest One forgets 

by B Raman

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institiute for Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com)

My dear American friends,

As you celebrate the birth of the New Year, do you remember a man called Daniel Pearl, a young and lovable American who used to work as the South Asia correspondent of the "Wall Street Journal" based in Mumbai?

Do you remember how he died a horrendous death  at the hands of Pakistani pan-Islamic terrorists allied to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda in the International Islamic Front (IIF) during a professional visit to Karachi in January, 2002?

Do you remember how he was beheaded by the Karachi-based terrorists and a video-recording of the beheading was circulated all over Pakistan?

Do you remember how, as you were celebrating the birth of 2002, Pearl was working hard to find out who were the sleeping agents of Al Qaeda and the IIF in the USA so that you, my American friends, could be spared the horror of another 9/11?

Do you remember that Pearl felt that the answer to this question was to be found in Karachi and not in the USA?

Do you remember how he was kidnapped and kept as hostage in property belonging to an organisation called Al Rashid Trust in Karachi, which was close to the Taliban of Afghanistan and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) of Pakistan, both members of the IIF?

Do you remember that Al Rashid Trust was one of the first Pakistani organisations to be declared by the Bush Administration as terrorist-suspect after 9/11 and that its bank accounts were ordered to be frozen?

Do you remember why he went to Karachi risking his life, knowing that the city had always been a den of terrorists, heroin barons and mafia dons, patronised by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)?

Do you remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, who would have almost succeeded in killing dozens of innocent American children, women and men but for the alertness and courage of an American stewardess?

Do you remember that Reid reportedly told his interrogators that the final instructions to him to blow up the plane came by E-Mail from Karachi?

Do you remember that Pearl went to Karachi to find out who had sent this E-Mail?

Do you remember that his investigation had focussed  on three Pakistani organisations called the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al Islami (HUJI), of which the last two are members of the IIF?

Do you remember that since the 1990s the Counter-Terrorism Division of the US State Department, in its annual reports titled Patterns of Global Terrorism,had been drawing attention to the vilolent activities of the JUF cells in US territory?

Do you remember that in 1995 the HUM, under the name Al Faran, had kidnapped a group of Western tourists in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) of whom one was beheaded just as Pearl was beheaded, one managed to escape and the world still does not know what happened to the others?

Do you remember that the HUM and the HUJI used to work together under the name Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA) before October, 1997, and had established a number of secret cells amongst the Pakistani residents in the USA in order to carry their jihad to the USA?

Do you remember how Pearl felt that unless the tentacles of these organisations in the USA and elsewhere were detected and their cells destroyed, you, my American friends, cannot sleep safely again?

Do you remember how Gen.Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, initially blamed the JEM for the kidnapping and tried to divert suspicion away from the HUM and the HUJI?

Do you remember how he banned the JEM and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) on January 15, 2002, but not the JUF, the HUM and the HUJI?

Do you remember that his spokesmen in Pakistan's Interior Ministry had promised that another order banning them would follow and that this is yet to happen?

Do you remember the arrest in Pakistan in 1995 of a group of Pakistani Army officers headed by Maj. Gen. Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi, on a charge of conspiring to stage a coup against Mrs. Benazir Bhutto in collusion with the HUJI whose leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar was also arrested?

Do you remember that while the Army officers were court-martialed and jailed, Musharraf saw to it that Saifullah was released and not prosecuted?

Do you remember that Maj-Gen.Abbasi, a close personal friend of Musharraf, has also been released after Musharraf seized power in October,1999?

Do you remember how during his visit to the US in the beginning of February, 2002, Musharraf kept assuring you Americans that Pearl was still alive and that he was hopeful of having him rescued?

Do you remember that Pakistan's ISI announced that Omar Sheikh, the principal accused in the case, had been arrested in Lahore on February 12, 2002?

Do you remember how the Pakistani media reported that he had actually surrendered on February 5 to a former ISI officer then working as Home Secretary in the Government of Pakistani Punjab?

Do you remember that it turned out subsequently that Musharraf, while visiting the USA, knew of this and of what Omar Sheikh had been telling the ISI, after his surrender, about the fate of Pearl and that he concealed this from you, my American friends, so that this did not have any negative impact on his visit to the US?

Do you remember that the Karachi Police told the Pakistani media that Omar Sheikh had admitted his links with bin Laden and  his role in the Pearl kidnapping, in the bomb blast outside the Legislative Assembly of J&K in October, 2001, in the attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, and in the attack on the security guards outside the American Centre in Kolkata (Calcutta), which almost coincided with the kidnapping of Pearl?

Do you remember how the ISI tried to prevent the Pakistani media from publishing it?

Do you remember how the Editor of the "News", a prestigious Pakistani daily, who defied the ISI pressure and published the story was got sacked by the ISI and had to flee to the US fearing a threat to his life from the ISI?

Do you remember how Musharraf avoided and continues to avoid the handing-over of Omar Sheikh to the Americans for investigation and trial in connection with the kidnapping of some Western tourists in Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s lest he tell the American investigators about his links with bin Laden and the ISI and about his meeting with bin Laden in Kandahar before 9/11?

Do you remember the speculation in Pakistan that he had also told the Karachi Police that during his visit to Kandahar he had come to know of Al Qaeda's plans for 9/11 and had passed on this information to Lt.Gen. Ehsanul-Haq, the then Corps Commander in Peshawar, who is now the ISI Director-General?

Do you remember the secret trial of Omar Sheikh and his accomplices initially inside a Karachi jail and subsequently in a Hyderabad (Sindh) jail, which was prolonged under some excuse or the other, despite a provision in Pakistan's Anti-Terrorism Act introduced by Musharraf himself that the trial, including the appeal, process in terrorism-related cases should be completed within a month of the filing of the charge-sheet?

Do you remember the reports in the Pakistani media while the trial was on about the discovery of the beheaded body of Pearl and its subsequent identification on the basis of the interrogation of some members of the HUM (International), the HUJI and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), another member of the IIF, who were arrested by the Karachi Police and who admitted their role in the beheading of Pearl?

Do you remember that amongst those arrested were some Yemeni-Balochis (of mixed Yemeni-Balochi parentage), one of whom was reported to have actually beheaded Pearl?

Do you remember that none of these new facts were told to the court by the military regime while the trial was on?

Do you remember that the defence counsel for Omar Sheikh wanted the court to take cognisance of the media reports in this regard and that the military-directed court refused to do so?

Do you remember the death sentence awarded by the court to Omar Sheikh and the life sentence to the other accused?

Do you remember their appeal against this sentence?

Do you remember that the appeal is still to be disposed off?

Do you remember the subsequent arrests of some American residents of Yemeni origin near New York and reports of their links with Al Qaeda and the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ)?

Do you remember that every time any terrorist incident takes place in this region the names of the HUM, the HUM (International), the HUJI, the JEM, the LEJ, the JUF, the TJ,Yemenis and Yemeni-Balochis keep cropping up during the investigation?

Do you remember that it was to find the answers to these questions that Pearl went to Karachi?

Do you remember that it was to protect you, my American friends, that he went to Karachi and met a horrible death like a sacrificial goat at the end of the holy fasting period of Ramadan?

Do you remember the oft-repeated American pledge that the USA would not let the death of a single American at the hands of terrorists go unavenged?

My American friends, why then your reluctance to act on this pledge and avenge the cruel death of Pearl? Is it because of your fear that if you really had to act, you have to act against Musharraf, on whom you have showered certificates of good conduct since 9/11?

Is Musharraf's continuing in power more important to you than avenging the death of Pearl and ensuring that the pan-Islamic terrorists sheltered by Musharraf in Pakistan are smoked out and eliminated?

My dear American friends, Bush may come and Bush may go, but the bin Ladens and their ilk will go on for ever unless you introspect sincerely on my posers above, draw the right conclusions and act courageously and with determination on them.