Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read online

  Isn’t the idea, for this first trip, to say nothing? To begin the investigation by remaining incognito as long as possible? Luckily I had kept the “multiple entry” visa given me in February, during my “Afghan mission.” So I didn’t have to say anything to anyone. Nothing asked. I didn’t have to go by the Pakistani embassy to explain myself. And now that I’m here, I’m determined not to say more than I have to. That will last as long as it lasts. It will cause problems, of course, with various contacts and, especially, with officials. But too bad for the officials. I’ll have other occasions for them to tell me what I already know: that Pearl had been here since Christmas. That he was on the trail of the man with the shoe bomb on the Paris-Miami airbus, Richard Colvin Reid. That he had been “overly intrusive,” too “prying,” sticking his nose into delicate matters that don’t concern foreigners. That he was wrong to trust Omar Sheikh, who had hoodwinked him by promising to lead him to Reid’s guru, Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, leader of Jamaat al-Fuqrah, the terrorist sect on the FBI’s list of terrorist organizations, and who on said day, instead of leading him to Gilani, took him to a house in the suburbs of Karachi where, after eight days, on 31 January, he was executed. That Omar Sheikh was arrested. That he is at this very moment on trial. That it is through his trial that the regime decided to focus on Islamism in Pakistan—we are following the case, Mr. Lévy! Let justice run its course! Don’t be too nosy yourself . . .

  For now, there are the places. The atmospheres. The air Pearl breathed, every day, after his arrival on a winter morning at the Karachi airport. There’s the Marriott, where I also have taken a room. The Hotel Akbar, in Rawalpindi, where he met for the first time his future executioner, Omar Sheikh, and where I must go myself. The Village Garden, in the lower city, their rendezvous the evening of his abduction. There is the place of his ordeal. The place where his body was found, cut in ten pieces, then put back together for burial: the torso, the head placed at the base of the neck, the arms severed at the shoulders, the thighs, the legs, the feet. All the places he had been, tragic or ordinary, where I want to try to find, to sense, his presence. And for all of that—all the mystery surrounding Pearl, to retrace his steps, to imagine what he felt, lived, and suffered—I don’t need a visa or meetings in high places, or, especially, too much visibility.

  The role of an ordinary tourist suits me fine. At least it allows me to ward off the real risk of being taken for a “journalist”: a category not only defamatory, but unintelligible in a country which I know (and which I will soon have the occasion to verify) is drugged on fanaticism, doped on violence, and has lost even the very idea of what a free press could be. Daniel Pearl . . . The group of English journalists stoned in December in the Pashtun hills of Chaman . . . The BBC team attacked around the same time somewhere on the Afghan border . . . The journalist from The Independent, Robert Fisk, beaten and injured by a crowd of fanaticized Afghan refugees . . . Shaheen Sehbai, the courageous editor of the Karachi News threatened with death by the secret service for going too far on, precisely, the Pearl affair . . . In fact, he was forced to flee to the United States . . . So, low profile. I’m content with a low profile.

  “Sorry, it’s the police,” the driver says suddenly as he pulls over to the side.

  I had asked him to leave the main road, using the traffic as a pretext, but in fact what I wanted was to find a guest-house down a side street where I had stayed thirty years ago, just before leaving for India and Bangladesh. I was absorbed in my recollections—the bizarre feeling of having already seen these streets, these low houses, but as if in another life, as if in a dream—engrossed, also, in grim reflections on the freedom of the press in Pakistan and on the disappearance of this city’s languid past, a city I once liked but which now seemed horribly metamorphosed. So I hadn’t noticed the policeman stepping out of the half-light—long hair, wrinkled peacoat, bloodshot eyes lined with kohl, young but not juvenile, hard features, a machine-gun held nervously at arm’s length and, in the other hand, an absurd flashlight, whose beam isn’t larger than a pencil, which he aims at us.

  “You’ll have to get out. He’s going to ask you something. I was going too fast.”

  The cop—a real cop?—pulls me out of my seat a little roughly, looks me up and down, surveys with some distaste my old leather jacket and three-day beard, and then takes from my pocket the handful of rupees I had changed at the airport, and my passport.

  The passport visibly surprises him.

  “Lévy?” he says incredulous. “Are you Lévy? Is your name really Lévy?”

  Instantly I tell myself: “Catastrophe! Immediate invalidation of the theory according to which the Pakistanis never having seen a Jew in their life, my name, etc . . . ” And then, the memories of Bangladesh come back to me and I remember that “Lévy” is the name of a prestigious paramilitary battalion, created by the English to police the borders. (To be more precise: the “Levy Malakand,” named for the Malakand, the semi-tribal zone near Afghanistan, where the regular army won’t go, leaving it to the “Levys” to maintain order.) I remember the homonym, almost cheered by it, and sense it will help me out again, like thirty years ago in Jessore when, having gotten somewhat lost, I found myself face to face with an elite unit of the Pakistani army.

  “Two thousand rupees,” he says, softening, in the tone of a merchant giving you a real good deal. “Speeding, your situation is not in order: but, for you, only two thousand rupees.”

  I think about protesting. I could get on my high horse, invoke the respect due the Levy Malakand, call on the driver who has remained in the car with his head on the steering wheel pretending to sleep during the whole incident. But no. Above all, no. I leave the two thousand rupees. And as if nothing had happened, without a word of reproach or the slightest comment to the driver, I get back in the taxi, only too happy to step into the role of a swindled tourist. All is well. Good beginning. Balthasar Gracian: “The things of this world must be looked at in reverse, to be seen the right way round.”

  CHAPTER 2 HOUSE OF TORMENT

  I am in the house where Pearl was held captive.

  Well, I say “the” house as if there had been only one and as if I were certain that he was detained, tortured, dismembered and buried in the same place.

  In reality no one knows for sure. There are people in Karachi who believe that, both for purposes of blurring the trail, thwarting the searches of the FBI and Pakistani Rangers, and reducing the risks of being reported by the neighbors, the kidnappers might have moved him from hideout to hideout during those seven days in this sprawling agglomeration of fourteen million people that is Karachi.

  But there is one place, at least, that everyone thinks of, because it is there, on May 17, after months of searching every cemetery in the city, that buttons from Daniel Pearl’s shirt were found, and the car seat where he was seated in the photos sent to the press by his captors—and then, in the garden, three feet under the ground, his body in ten pieces. It is there, in the heart of the neighborhood of Gulzar e-Hijri that in all probability the execution took place, and that is where, one conjecture leading to the next, I suppose he was held from the first night.

  It takes almost an hour to get there by car.

  Ask nothing of anyone, just send the Pakistani “fixer” ahead to make sure there’s no police patrol around the site still deemed highly sensitive, and to be on the safe side, announce oneself to the informal authorities in the vicinity and to the Aghan refugee camps one passes through.

  From the Village Garden in the middle of the city—where Omar Sheikh, the leader of the abductors, had fixed their rendezvous—take Sharah e-Faisal, the avenue of King Faisal, which goes up toward the airport and follow it about twenty minutes. It’s a good road, reassuring, going through the business quarters, a marine base, retired veterans’ residential neighborhoods, the Air Force museum, the Jinnah museum as well as the Finance and Trade Center where the main offices of several large Pakistani banks are grouped.

  Then make a left on Rashid Minhas Road, which is again a large avenue with a strong army presence: on the right, the “ordnance depot,” on the opposite sidewalk, another group of residences for retired officers, a cinema, the “Aladin” theme park, with its aquatic playgrounds, its video and shopping arcades, the crowded Iqbal gardens, the National Institute of Public Information, a university for adults where upper-level bureaucrats are retrained. Here, too, the traffic is light, a perfectly calm road. An impression of normal life, at least on the day of my passage—and why would it have been otherwise the day Pearl made the trip?

  After about ten minutes, maybe fifteen, we turn east and get on the Super Highway, a four-lane highway, the “lifeline” of Pakistan, which heads toward Hyderabad. We pass through the Sorhab Goth quarter with its terminal for buses and trucks, a vegetable market, an interminable kind of compound without trees or vegetation, built on the ruins of the Pashtun areas destroyed in the 1980s, a village of Afghan refugees, numerous little restaurants where pulao and tea is served with, as in Kabul, dishes of sugar-coated almonds, a restaurant under construction; modest buildings, poorer than on Rashid Minhas, but no more or less than certain quarters in central Karachi. Nothing there, either, that might alert Pearl. Nothing that would lead him to think he was entering some far-off and terrifying no-man’s-land.

  Left again just after the restaurant under construction. Another large artery, in worse condition, but quite acceptable; Mehran Avenue. A sign indicates the Karachi Institute of Information Technology, another, Dreamworld Family Resort, a sort of playground where young Pakistanis organize the equivalent of our rave parties. Others announce Maymar Apartments, or Ghulshan e-Maymar Complex, or Karachi Development Authority, a quasi-governmental institution for urban development, or, visible on the left,
the Dawat Academy International University, whose construction is at a standstill, with only the adjacent mosque completed. Here, suddenly, the landscape turns bleak. There is something sinister in these vacant lots and half-finished houses whose lower floors are squatted, the eucalyptus trees that never quite finish dying of thirst. But it’s still not the end-of-the-world atmosphere, the hell, the impenetrable and sordid lower depths that was described to us when it became necessary to explain the failure of the Pakistani police to find the American journalist.

  And then, left again on a narrower street, Sharah e-Mullah Jewan Road, where for the first time—by now we’ve been on the road almost an hour—the landscape really changes. More vacant land and rocky terrain with scattered garbage dumps, few houses, the street deserted, no cars, no pedestrians. A few minutes more, then we park and walk the last 200 meters. Off to the right about 500 meters away is a large abandoned house topped with a television antenna. Eight hundred yards further is the madrasa Jamia Rashidia with its soccer field, and behind it, hovels, apparently abandoned. Finally, between the big house with the antenna and the madrasa, are two farmhouses facing each other and surrounded by the same wall of cement brick about five feet high. It’s in the first farmhouse that Daniel Pearl was held prisoner.

  This is the route (another exists, but longer, from the other side, and with lots of police) he must have taken.

  And such is the time (one hour, maybe less) of his last journey. A police report based on the deposition of one of the conspirators, Fazal Karim, and repeated by the Pakistani press, speaks of several hours and a change of vehicles—but why? What’s the point, since the victim was trusting?

  These are the principle stages of his transfer into a zone about which too much has been said, but I repeat—it must be remembered when the question is posed as to what the Pakistani police did or did not do to find him alive—that it was said that the zone was out of reach, a jungle. Well, it’s doubtless a lowly place, a disreputable and dangerous area, propitious for all sorts of trafficking and full of the same sort of houses as this one, and where the industry of kidnapping, which flourishes in Karachi, has always had its hideouts. But everyone knows that most of the so-called farms are the refugees of criminals or Islamists. I made the journey and can testify that, apart from this last little stretch, we never leave the city.

  What did Pearl do during this time?

  What could he have been thinking? What went through his mind all along this journey?

  Did he understand that he had fallen into a trap and was not being taken to the interview he had sought with Gilani?

  Did he ask questions? Was he anxious, impatient, angry? Did it become necessary to threaten him? Block the door? Subdue or hit him ?

  A neighbor, whose son is enrolled at the madrasa, says Pearl was seen arriving blindfolded at the gates of the house.

  Of course anything is possible.

  And, assuming this was the case, assuming that after the Super Highway, as they entered the less frequented Sharah e-Mullah Jewan Road, where the flow of traffic ebbs, they took the precaution to tie a scarf over his eyes—it wouldn’t necessarily be cause for alarm. It wouldn’t be the first time a journalist had undergone such measures on his way to meet some personality whose hideout must remain secret. It happened to me in Colombia, when I was being driven deep into Cordoba to see Carlos Castaño the notorious leader of the paramilitary fascists. . . and thirty years ago in Bangladesh, when I was being taken into the western outskirts of Calcutta to the Maoist leader Abdul Motin, wanted by the police of both Bengals. . . .

  But deep down I don’t believe it.

  I can’t see his captors taking the risk of driving around with a blindfolded foreigner.

  Nor do I believe that Pearl, on this route, which I have seen as though through his eyes, found any reason to be afraid.

  My feeling is that he remained more or less confident throughout a journey that a reporter with some experience of Karachi would find normal.

  Possibly some apprehension, a few dark thoughts crossing his mind, but dismissed. I imagine him finding the way a little long, chaotic, but also questioning his companions, scribbling in the pages of his notebook, crooked lines as always when riding in a car, even joking, noting what he sees; PNS Karsaz, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Gulberg, Knightsbridge Restaurant, Bundoo Khan, North Karachi Sind Industrial Estate, Karachi Development Authority. And then, in the last stretch, if he was really blindfolded, a little nervous, on his guard, but continuing to take mentally the notes he can no longer take by hand: noises, odors, the probable distance traveled. And at the very end, after getting out of the car, the last snare—the uneven path he feels under his feet that takes him to the house where at last he will have his interview, happy to be there, taking a deep breath and shaking off the ride in this enclosed space where, according to the kidnapper’s testimony, his first question was, “Where is Gilani? Where is the man I’m supposed to meet?” At this point Bukhari, who led this little convoy on his motorcycle and would soon direct the execution, put a fraternal arm around Pearl’s shoulders and with the other hand stuck a gun in his ribs. But even then, he didn’t believe it. Even with a gun in his side, even hearing Bukhari tell him with a big smile, “Now, you are kidnapped,” he still believed it was a kind of joke and waited until he was taken in to the house, searched and undressed, before beginning to comprehend what was happening to him.

  Behind him—and today behind me—the house of Saud Memon, the owner of the property.

  Next to it, the two-story house of Fazal Karim, Memon’s driver who witnessed the scene and most likely held Pearl’s head during the execution, and eventually cut the body into ten pieces.

  A few hundred yards away, the madrasa Jamia Rashidia, whose students testify they neither saw nor heard anything until the sixth day— two days before the murder—when the American took advantage of a trip to the toilet to try to escape through an air vent. From the roof of the school they saw Fazal Karim and another retaliating with blows and a bullet fired into his leg: “You’re going to pay now, you’re going to crawl like a worm in the dirt . . . ”

  On the other side of the street, curtained by acacias with white plastic bags hanging from their branches, are two buildings under construction that wouldn’t have been there at the time. Desire of the police to see the area inhabited? To encourage development?

  There, under his feet and today under mine, so perfectly quiet that the echo of my steps on the twigs and palm leaves that cover the ground is deafening, the small courtyard, planted as well with acacias, palms, bamboo, and mango trees, is where the remains of his tortured body were found. Like the bodies of saints, it was accompanied by meager relics: three pieces of faded green rope, anti-diarrhea pills, two car seats, a piece of the top of his track suit, three bloodstained plastic sacks used to wrap his dismembered body. What learned art of torture! How, with a knife, and before rigor mortis, does one cut a body into so many pieces?

  And here, sheltered by a wall with large black letters indicating the direction to the National Public School and further hidden from sight by another dense row of green acacias, is the concrete block building, a narrow rectangle with its two rooms and no electricity (although the rest of the neighborhood is electrified), low ceilinged (I have to lower my head, I imagine he did too), damp and smelling of rotten apples and wet plaster (water from rudimentary cistern overflows into the room). Here is where he spent six days and six nights, where he was interrogated, brought back after trying to escape, and where he was finally killed, then dismembered, on the night of the 31st, although his killers still had the effrontery to demand a ransom from the Wall Street Journal and his family. The Golgotha of Daniel Pearl. The scene of his Calvary. Daniel Pearl naked, pitiful and bleeding, like the Chinese youth who by order of Prince Ao-Han-Ouan was sliced up alive, and whose agony, eyes rolled up, face ecstatic, his smile stiffened by suffering, had so impressed Georges Bataille—the famous “torture of a hundred pieces” from Coupable and The Interior Experience.