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| Terror Networks |
| Killer of Daniel Pearl under constant guard |
| 2006-06-23 |
| It is almost four years now since a Pakistani court had sentenced to death Sheikh Ahmad Omar Saeed, a London School of Economics graduate turned jihadi, for the gruesome murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl. However, Omar has managed to avoid being sent to the gallows during all these years and his appeal against the sentence has seen almost 50 adjournments since his conviction, for inexplicable reasons. An Anti-Terrorist Court in Karachi began his trial on April 22, 2002 and gave its verdict on July 15, 2002, which was instantly challenged in the Sindh High Court. The American intelligence sleuths involved in the investigations believe Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and slaughtered because he had uncovered some vital links between the Pakistani intelligence establishment and the al Qaeda network. They are convinced that Omar was actually a double agent of the Pakistani intelligence as well as al Qaeda. Omar had once been the right hand man of Maulana Masood Azhar, who leads the Jaish-e-Mohammad. The involvement of an intelligence agent in the murder had generated enormous US pressure, forcing the most trusted Bush ally in his war on terror — Musharraf — to take on the jihadi groups in Pakistan. On March 22, 2002, General Musharraf stated in Islamabad, “Daniel Pearl had come from Mumbai and made intrusion into the areas which are dangerous and he should have avoided it. Perhaps he was over-intrusive. A media person should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas. But unfortunately he got over-involved.” Yet the million-dollar question remains: what exactly had Pearl got himself “over-involved” in? The Wall Street Journal reporter came to Pakistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to cover the US-led war on terror. But unlike most Western journalists who, after coming to Pakistan, sought official help for reporting, and thus got hooked up with local journalists, Pearl decided to remain independent of any official patronage in uncovering the ‘whole truth’. Besides visiting Islamabad and Karachi, he was spotted in many other cities — Bahawalpur, Peshawar and Quetta — where no ordinary foreign journalist dared to tread, in view of the desperation of the extremist jihadis at that time, who were fuming because of the US-led attack on Afghanistan and the subsequent killings there. With this background in mind, the somewhat overexcited movements of a hyper Pearl made the Pakistani intelligence agencies suspicious of him and his agenda, making them follow him and keep him under close watch. Some say he was working on the shoe bomber Richard Reid’s story in the backdrop of the latter’s alleged links with Pakistani jihadi groups. Some say he was desperately trying to explore any possible links between the Pakistani intelligence agencies and the Osama-led al Qaeda network. Which statement is true no one in Pakistan is ready to say, neither Musharraf nor the intelligence agencies working under his command. Whatever the truth may be, the fact remains that Pearl had become fascinated in a number of investigative stories involving Pakistani intelligence agencies. The American investigators, therefore, believe that a plan was chalked out to lure Pearl into a position where he could be kidnapped. He was finally abducted from Karachi on January 23, 2002. The day Daniel Pearl was kidnapped he had left his Karachi rest house to meet the British-born Islamic militant Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed at the Metropole Hotel. Pearl hoped Omar would arrange a subsequent meeting with Pir Mubarak Shah Gilani, head of a small extremist group called Tanzeem-ul-Furqa. Having initially met Omar along with his colleague and local journalist, Pearl chose to venture out alone. According to a taxi driver who drove Pearl to the Hotel, he asked him to stop near the hotel and got out. He then went to a car parked nearby in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out, introduced himself and invited Pearl to get in. He willingly did so. The car then departed. In an e-mail to the American authorities four days later, an unknown group, The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty sent ransom demands along with pictures of the 38-year old reporter in chains. The list of demands raised by the abductors included freedom for Taliban prisoners, specifically of Mullah Mohammad Zaeef, Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan, and the release of F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan. The Pakistani authorities subsequently launched a drive for the recovery of Pearl. They started searching for Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under an assumed name, had laid the trap for Pearl. They took into custody Omar Sheikh’s father, wife and young child in order to force him to surrender. On February 5, 2005, Omar Sheikh surrendered to Brigadier Ejaz Hussain Shah, the home secretary of Punjab, who had previously served the ISI as its Punjab chief and is now holding the coveted slot of Director General Intelligence Bureau in Islamabad. Brigadier Ejaz kept Omar in custody for a whole week until February 12, 2002 and then handed him over to the Karachi police authorities for interrogation. The public announcement about his arrest said he was captured on February 12, 2002 and did not refer to the fact that he had been in custody since February 5, 2002. He then confessed to having kidnapped Pearl. During interrogation, Omar told the members of a joint team of American and Pakistan officials that he had been working for the intelligence agencies since his December 1999 release from India. The Vajpayee government was compelled to release from the Tehar Jail, Srinagar, Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar and their jihadi mentor Maulana Masood Azhar after the hijackers of an Indian airliner demanded the same. The most disturbing revelation Omar made during interrogation was that his captors might have killed Pearl by then. On February 20, 2002, three men approached a Karachi-based journalist, offering to sell a compact disk depicting Pearl’s death for $ 200,000 as well as a promise of global coverage. These men had been seen previously distributing press releases for an unknown militant group. Lacking the apparatus needed to play the CD-ROM as proof, the three men returned the next day with the footage converted to videotape. With a camera arranged from a local video store, the journalist was able to view and confirm the tape’s gruesome images. The video was titled ‘The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl’. The tape made its way to the Pakistani government and the US government, and eventually it leaked onto the Internet through a jihadi site. The film consisted of a Pearl monologue describing his Jewish upbringing, his family’s involvement in the creation of Israel, and his feelings regarding the current controversy. His monologue was presented in edited sound bites; at times he appeared relaxed and his speech was natural, but during other parts he was tense and his speech sounded forced. Most of what he said was not terribly controversial, and notably he did not claim to be a spy for the US or Israel. According to the FBI investigation, when Daniel Pearl’s throat was first slashed, a technical error caused it not to have been captured on film, thus it had to be re-filmed. The man holding the knife is now strongly believed to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the then chief operational commander for al Qaeda, who was arrested from Rawalpindi in March 2003. On May 17, 2002, three held activists of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — a banned militant group — helped the Karachi police recover the dismembered body of Daniel Pearl from a vacant plot in the Gadap Town off Super Highway, owned by Al-Rasheed Trust. The Trust was founded in the 1980s by Mufti Ahmed as one of the several ostensibly humanitarian relief organisations that used to finance numerous jihadi outfits like Jaish-e-Mohammad. The three detained suspects were among the six alleged associates of Omar Sheikh and had revealed during interrogation that the US journalist had been kept in a house in Orangi Town when he was alive. The million-dollar question pops up once again — why was Pearl kidnapped in the first place and then killed? The Wall Street Journal quoted Omar Sheikh in a March 2002 report telling his investigators, “He was falling into my trap so easily, so I thought I might as well do it.” Omar’s aim, wrote the Journal, was to “strike a blow against the US and embarrass the pro-US Pakistan government.” According to the US intelligence findings, in the days right before September 11, a flurry of money transfers occurred between the September 11 paymaster in the United Arab Emirates, presumably to Omar Sheikh and Mohammad Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers. Between September 6 and 10, 2001, $ 26,315 was wired from the hijackers back to the UAE — leftover money from the September 11 plot. On September 11, the investigations reveal, in the hours before the attacks, the paymaster transferred $ 40,871 from Omar’s UAE bank accounts to his Visa card, and caught a plane flight from the UAE to Pakistan. There are records of him making six ATM withdrawals in Karachi on September 13, 2001 and then his trail goes cold. Afterwards, Omar visited Afghanistan to meet Osama bin Laden. Omar was shifted to Karachi Central Prison from Hyderabad Jail on May 19, 2006, where he is being guarded round-the-clock. The writer is the former editor of Weekly Independent, currently affiliated with Reuters and the Gulf News |
| Posted by:john |
| #1 The Pakistan connection Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. He was environment minister 1997-2003 |
| Posted by: john 2006-06-23 17:01 |