PART TWO.
OMAR.
CHAPTER 1 IN THE EYE OF THE ASSASSIN.
I'm back in Europe.
Five months have passed since Daniel Pearl's murder and my decision to write this book.
I'm going over my notes on his life-and at the same time reading and rereading At Home In the World, the collection of his articles published by the Wall Street Journal.
And I confess that, the more time passes, the more I reflect on all this, the more I advance-if not in the investigation, then at least into the depth of Pearl's personality and the mystery of his assassination-the more I ask myself what could have led someone to designate such a man for a death so barbarous . . . and the more I am intrigued by the personality of his assassin.
Not that there was just one assassin, of course.
Not that one can say, "There, that's the assassin, the man who killed Daniel Pearl-the idea came from his mind, was carried out by his hand."
In fact, the little I know so far, the little anyone knows, is that, on the contrary, it was a complex crime in which many are implicated. The little that has been established so far is that it took not one but several men to ensnare Pearl-to disarm his vigilance, lure him into the trap at the Village Garden restaurant, drive him to Gulzar e-Hijri, sequester, kill, and bury him. I've cited the Yemenis . . . and Bukhari, the man who dictated the words to say to the camera . . . Fazal Karim, the man who held his head while another cut his throat . . . Saud Memon, owner of the property . . . Lahori . . . there are even more whom I have yet to clearly identify-but patience, it will come. It's not a crime, it's a puzzle. It's not an organization, it's an army. And nothing could be more simplistic in the face of this puzzle, this army, than to take this one or that one and declare: "He's the assassin."
But, at the same time, there undoubtedly had to be one person to recruit these men, one mind, having conceived of the crime, to channel their energies and distribute their assignments, an architect for such a pyramid, a conductor for this sinister orchestra, a director for this murder committed in unison, an emir who, though not necessarily present at Pearl's Gulzar e-Hijri jail, nor, as we shall see, at the Village Garden rendezvous, designated the target, defined the strategy, pulled the strings, and recruited Bukhari, Fazal Karim, Lahori and the others.
That man's name is Omar.
His exact name is Omar Sheikh-given name Omar, family name Sheikh (and not, as the Pakistanis often say, Sheikh Omar, in the same way they say Mullah Omar, for the Taliban leader).
He is the one I call "the assassin."
It is he who-arrested in the days following Pearl's death with three of his accomplices in Lahore-admitted to being the "mastermind" of the operation.
It is he who promptly declared to investigators, "I planned the kidnapping because I was sure I could negotiate with the Americans for the release of one or two people, such as the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef."
It is he who, as his three accomplices (and others not yet judged) readily admitted, had called them one by one during the month of January, saying, "I've got a Jew, an American, a good target, not difficult, an excellent bargaining chip . . . "
It is he who, on 15 July 2002, at the conclusion of a three-month trial full of surprise developments-including three changes of judges, threats of terrorist attacks, numerous suspensions, adjournments, diverse pressures and blackmail-was condemned by a tribunal in Hyderabad to death by hanging.
And he is the one I'm thinking of when I write "the assassin," in the singular, intrigues me: his is the face I see when I tell myself that we must-without delaying or waiting to discover all the other pieces of the puzzle, the ramifications, the accomplices, and the people ultimately behind it all-regard, most closely, the assassin.
A portrait, therefore, of Omar.
Be careful, though, Mariane said in New York.
Keep yourself from personalizing too much, from delving too much into the psychology, both of Omar and his accomplices. Don't enter into their madness or, worse, their logic.
Don't give them, and especially him, the inestimable gift of celebrity, which is, deep down, all they dream of-the glory of the barbarian, the Warholian fifteen minutes against a background of cruelty and crime. Why not leave things as they are? Why not condemn this man to his essential insignificance? Why interest yourself in the soul of Omar?
In a way, of course, she's right.
It is, in fact, a precept that has long guided me whenever I have had to deal with figures of evil in this world. And so she is inviting me not to lose sight of a good and wise lesson-the snares of complacency, the risk of understanding so much you excuse it in the end. The risk that in telling how it was, in making it believable, little by little, by a gradual seduction of sense and reason, it becomes inevitable, almost natural, to conclude that things had to happen the way they did. "Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of evil men," it says in Deuteronomy. Enter not into the mind of the perverse for fear of dulling the vital force of revolt, of anger, has been my own position, when I have written about the fascist figures of the 20th century.
And should I doubt or hesitate, for this particular crime, to follow the law that usually guides me, the strange attention this man has attracted in Karachi would end up convincing me.
The "moderate islamist" who in a letter to the editor of an English-language newspaper in Islamabad, explained in April, just before my trip, that Omar had at least the merit of "defending his ideas," of going "all the way with his principles," and for that he deserved the respect of "real Muslims."
Then there's Adnan Khan, a former member of Jaish e-Mohammed, one of the principle Islamist terrorist organizations, who served five years in prison between 1989 and 1994 for the murder of his landlord, and who, a few weeks after the death of Pearl, confessed to the crime in an attempt to clear his hero Omar. "My life had no meaning," he admitted to police in Sindh after they had verified that he had, in fact, nothing to do with the murder. "Always the same, the days, the seasons, the worries-but him, his life, at once just and glorious for Islam . . . God bless him . . . I wanted to help him-I wanted to save this great man . . . "
A letter addressed to Omar in early July in his Hyderabad prison, came to my knowledge through one of his lawyers: "My name is Sikander Ali Mirani. I live in Larkana. I admire your fight. You are in my eyes and in the eyes of all my friends a modern-day prophet of Islam. And to this prophet, this saint, I want to reveal my doubts, my difficulties and my sacrifices- and I want to ask also for his help. You are from a rich family, yes? Your father has business in England? Then please ask him to help me immigrate to London. Use your influence to help me to study, like you did." The young man attached a copy of his passport. Plus, as if for a casting call or a job application, a photo that looks as though it were taken for the occasion: an awkward young man, a little fat, looking tough. And on the back of the envelope, in the same careful handwriting, his address in Larkana.
Letters like this one, intercepted by prison officials, arrive by the dozen every week.
They testify to the resonance, not only in Pakistan but throughout the Arab-Muslim world, of Omar's act and the idea-present in Sikander Ali Mirani's letter-that a lesson was taught to Americans and Jews. The letters testify as well, it seems, to a resonance with his attitude during the trial, his defiant way of facing it, his arrogance and refusal to accept the rules of a legal system copied from the English.
And they make clear the need for extreme prudence when undertaking a portrait of this man and attempting to penetrate the mystery of his motives.
However . . .
I read the accounts of the trial appearing in the local press sent to me by my Pakistani interpreter and assistant-my fixer.
I note the strange way this man had of not really defending himself except on the finer points of certain details; how in the main, he stood by his deed.
I have before me a page from a major Karachi daily, from the time of the verdict.
There are two photos side by side.
That of Pearl's, face-front, with his sparkling expression, the dazzling glimmer in his eyes that made him seem curious about everything, his look of well-meaning irony, his sense of humor, his evident friendliness, and, on his lips, something like an old smile that hasn't worn off, caught by the photographer.
And that of Omar, in profile, handsome as well, his face well-constructed, high forehead, a look without vice or malice though somewhat veiled. His physiognomy appears intelligent and rather frank, tortoiseshell glasses, a strong chin under a well-trimmed beard, a good man it would seem, slightly tart smile, an intellectual demeanor, very Westernized-nothing, in any case, that signals the obtuse Islamist, the fanatic; nothing really that tells us, "Yes it is I, the assassin . . . it is from this head the plot to kill, then dismember, an exemplary American came . . . "
I have many other photos.
In addition to pictures e-mailed to me by my fixers, I brought back from Pakistan at least one photograph of each of the accomplices identified by the police: assassins plunged in their own vertigo, brutish, faces steeped in hate, death in their eyes, head down or demon laugh, hackles raised in vengeance or with the half-smile of the torturer awaiting his hour-they all give the same impression of criminality just below the surface.
But I admit that none of them affect me like Omar-none of them impress me like this strange man, apparently well-mannered and gentle, refined and subtle, and who, in the other pictures of him appearing in the Anglo-Saxon press taken at the very end of the trial, never veers from a confounding impassiveness that is rarely seen on the face of a condemned man.
This monster who is also a man like any other, this killer in whose face I fail to find any of the stigmata that, in the common imagination, signals the presence of absolute Evil; this manifestly astute man, this arrogant man who, after the pronouncing of his sentence, as he was being taken from the room, found nothing better to say to his judges than, "We will see who dies first-me or the authorities who arranged this death sentence for me"; this enigmatic character I read about in the Guardian's brief-too brief-biography, in which the mixture of lucidity and blindness, of culture and brutal criminality reminds me of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, alias the Jackal, alias Carlos, the Venezuelan terrorist who was all over the front pages in the '70s and '80s and whom I wrote about in my book Diable en Tte . . . it's not enough to say he interests me or intrigues me-he is clearly the second most important character of this book.
So who, then, is Omar?
Where does he come from and what do we know about him, his criminal career, his life, in the early summer of 2002?
We know, for one thing, that he is not quite thirty years old.
He is linked to Jaish e-Mohammed, one of the most extreme, the most violent and the most prominent Islamist groups in Pakistan-and it was the head of this group, Masood Azhar, a mixture of ideologue and brute, of saint and killer, who was Omar's master in terrorism, his mentor.
It is known as well that this is not his first such crime-he was arrested and condemned once before, in India, in 1994, for a kidnapping plot similar to that of Pearl's. The object then was to obtain the release of Masood Azhar, who had been imprisoned a few months earlier for anti-Indian terrorism in the disputed province of Kashmir. Omar's victims in that case-three English tourists and an American-were freed by the Indian police at the last minute. In the inexhaustible interviews those victims have been giving to the Anglo-Saxon press in light of recent events, they say things such as: "I saw the animal . . . I spent eight days, ten, fifteen, thirty-two in his company . . . this is what I know of him . . . this is the impression I had . . . " They tell of a paradoxical individual, at once totally unstable and intellectually coherent, who played chess and read Mein Kampf, hated Jews and skinheads, recited constantly from the Koran yet did not seem particularly pious, and who announced apologetically that, unless his demands were met, he would decapitate them.
We also know he served six years in prison for those kidnappings, first in Uttar Pradesh and then New Delhi, but that he recovered his freedom on 31 December 1999, thanks to a bloody and spectacular airline hijacking by a jihadist group to which he and Masood Azhar belonged: an Indian Airlines Katmandu to Delhi flight was hijacked to Kandahar airport at the height of the Taliban era. To demonstrate their determination to the Indians and the world, in the front of the plane the hijackers staged a chilling scene in which one passenger was beheaded. After eight days of threats and bargaining, the 155 other passengers were freed in exchange for Omar and Masood.
And finally, it is known that this man-this madman, this hardened criminal, this zealot of kidnapping, this fanatic of God, this man whose hatred for the West brought him twice in eight years to violent crime - is not Pakistani but English; the reports I read make clear that he is, like all his comrades in Jaish-e-Mohammed, of Pakistani origin, but he was actually born in England, has an English passport, and spent his childhood and adolescence in England, that in England he was quite a brilliant student, that his family lives in London, his address is in London-that he is, in short, English.
Is this a monstrosity of an ordinary human, or the humanity of an extraordinary monster? That is the theme of this other investigation, as important to me as the first-into the mind of the Devil.
CHAPTER 2 A PERFECT ENGLISHMAN.
I went to London, where Omar was born on 23 December 1973, to a family that had immigrated from Lahore in 1968.
I visited the maternity ward of Whips Cross Hospital, a large public hospital in London's eastern suburbs. It is a little shabby, as English public hospitals sometimes are, but it's prosperous, modern, medically reliable. This is where Qauissia, his mother, came to give birth. The family is liberal and broad-minded, ostensibly not very particular in respect to Koranic laws regarding birth and delivery.
In nearby Wanstead, I found Perfect Fashions, the ready-to-wear import-export business that Omar's father established, and which he still runs with Omar's younger brother, Awais. It's a small store at 235 Commercial Road, on the corner of Myrdle Street. It's one long room filled with large, plastic-wrapped cartons piled on top of each other and marked either "made in Pakistan" or "Boston" (the name of another company?). On the day of my visit, stray open cartons and the few dresses displayed in the window on hangers or wax mannequins showed rather ordinary fabrics in garish colors and in cuts and styles destined for wholesalers. But business is prosperous. The balance sheets, available from the London Commerce Registry, indicate intense activity, a sound financial structure, and a pretax profit of hundreds of thousands of pounds per year over the last five years. The Sheikh family is well-off. Little Omar was raised in opulence. I imagine a happy childhood, an easy adolescence.
I found the house the family bought in 1977 and still owns, in Deyne Court Gardens, at the corner of Colvin Street, close to the Wanstead Bowls Club, and not far from the chess club which Omar frequented (because he was, it will be repeated to me at each step of my investigation, an excellent chess player). It's a residential street, lined with trees and gardens. It's a typical English cottage, with an attractive porch, arched windows, shingled roof, painted brick walls, a cluster of trees in front and, in back, an unfenced garden opening onto a common. I arrive early in the morning. It's the hour of the milk van and newspapers in the mailbox. The upstairs curtains are drawn shut. The family, because they stay late at the store, are probably sleeping. The shutters on one of the bedrooms are closed-Omar's room? Going around the back toward the common and looking through the ground-floor windows, I see a charming living room, an entrance where two men's coats and a hooded woman's raincoat hang, a well-equipped kitchen, an already set table, a pretty tablecloth, egg cups, boxes of cereal, a pitcher of milk, and flowered plates. All of which speaks of a close family, country living in the city, a carefree life, happiness. All of which tells a family story which must have been the same, even more peaceful, ten years ago, when Omar, the eldest son, was there. We are far, at any rate, from a setting of misery and oppression, of troubles and ruined lives, that we tend to associate with the genealogy of terrorism.
"I have nothing to say to you," Saeed Sheikh, the father, told me one evening, in a weary and constrained voice, when, after a long wait, I managed to catch him leaving his house, in a dark blue gabardine suit and felt hat. "No, I have nothing to say to you. Leave me alone." But I did have the time to make out, in the cold night air, his eyes like an aged child, the myopic look of his wan smile, his stiff, fan-shaped beard, the oddness of a drooping eyelid which gives him an air of perpetual irony. I had the time to observe in the lamplight what had struck me in a picture I had seen in the Guardian-he was the epitome of Commonwealth chic.
I met Awais Sheikh, the younger brother. He had also, over the telephone, after consulting with his father, refused to see me. But early one afternoon I surprised him in the store on Commercial Road. "I was passing by, Mr. Sheikh . . . Just a little hello, to see if you've changed your mind, if your father still forbids you to talk to me? I'm writing a book on Daniel Pearl, it's true, but it's also about your brother, so, can't we talk? Why not tell what you know about the trial, and your brother? I think the trial was botched, a parody of justice-it's incredible, I've never seen anything like it . . . am I wrong?" And Mr. Awais Sheikh, twenty-five years old, in a T-shirt like a young Englishman on vacation, with an Oxford accent, an intelligent look, and a boyish handsomeness, offers me tea and a bit of conversation, which proceeds haphazardly among the cardboard boxes.
"No, no, my sister went to Oxford. I'm Cambridge. Law studies at Cambridge. For that reason, if we decide to talk, we won't need a lawyer to set the rules of the game. You and I will do it, it'll be like child's play for me. The problem, you understand, is the appeal. My brother has filed an appeal and our father insists that nothing be said that could interfere with the procedure. Have I always worked here? No. I first worked in the city. I was a stock broker. And then came this misfortune. My father was all alone. Completely alone with my mother and our lawyers. And I had to come help, join him at Perfect Fashions, comfort him. We're a close family. We've pulled together in this ordeal-and what an ordeal! What a disaster! Can you imagine having a brother condemned to death when he's innocent?"
The telephone never stops ringing. Mohammed, the employee, in Pakistani dress with the flowing pajamas and traditional white tunic, answers in perfect English. I notice that, contrary to Awais, he has a beard. I also notice, above his head, a poster resembling a calendar, with various "Words of the Prophet" for each of life's great moments: births, mourning, greetings, partings, condolences . . . Mohammed or Awais? Employee or boss?
"And you, Mr. Levy-tell me a little about yourself. What do you think about Palestine? The war in Afghanistan? Chechnya? Iraq? Bosnia?" And after I established my credibility: "You say that my brother's trial was a travesty, that it was a parody of justice-OK! But don't say it's incredible, never before seen. Just look at Guantanamo. How do you explain Guantanamo? Isn't Bush's justice as bad as Musharraf's?"
We talk for half an hour. I sense the young intellectual, very concerned about what he calls the massacre of Moslems in Europe and the world. I also sense the little brother, fascinated, no matter what's been done, by the elder, whom he can't see as a criminal. In 1994, when Omar had organized, in India, his first hostage-taking, the English press descended on Awais to ask him about this big brother, who had cast his lot with jihadist groups fighting for the liberation of Kashmir, and was now rotting in the prisons of Uttar Pradesh. Awais confided: "Omar is a good man, a noble soul." And again today, even though his brother has committed a crime that has horrified the world and linked forever his image to the mutilated body of Daniel Pearl, Awais continues to see him only as a good boy, a defender of the widow and the orphan, always ready with passion for the noble cause. "The American journalist who was beheaded? Yes, of course, it's terrible. I feel the family's pain . . . But it's not like my brother. I repeat that I don't believe he did it. Do you know he was such a gentle soul that he avoided reading about crimes in the newspapers for fear of becoming enraged, of taking up a victim's cause? Did you know that one time, in London, he jumped on the subway tracks just before the train arrived to rescue an old woman who had fallen off the platform?" But in the end, I don't sense an ideologue. I don't sense a fanatic. I have before me, in other words, a Moslem who is conscious of his identity and concerned-who can blame him?-for the fate of Chechens and Palestinians; but at no time do I have the feeling that he's a militant Islamist disguised as a Cambridge graduate.
I went from there to Leydenstone Station, which is an open air station not far from the family home. Too long ago, of course-no one among the employees could remember the event, but I tried to imagine this big, strapping and agile fellow jumping down, stopping the train, and extricating the old woman. Why not?
I went to the Nightingale Primary School, the pretty little school, typically English, close to home and almost like the country, where he spent his early years. No one there remembers him either, but I imagine him as a good pupil with no problems, the children's drawings on the walls the same as they are today, easy, happy school days . . . It's so close, isn't it? The little boy can come home alone on foot, with his friends . . .
I went to the Forest School in Snaresbrook, a rather upscale private school-which counts among its former students the film director Peter Greenaway, the actor Adam Woodyatt, and the English cricket captain Nasser Hussain-where he completed the major part of his secondary studies. Georges Paynter, the headmaster, who was an economics professor at the time, still has very precise recollections of him. He remembers a bright student with exceptional grades. He remembers something in particular which attests to this: "School fees-the educational costs at the Forest School, at that time, must have been close to ten thousand pounds a year-well, we have a tradition of exempting each year a handful of particularly brilliant students. And Omar was among them. Let me turn on the computer . . . yes, here it is. The family had the means to pay but, because of his merit, we gave him a scholarship. So you see, that proves what I'm saying . . . " He remembers Omar in the first row, so attentive, so concentrated, setting the example. He remembers him as "head of house," helping the smaller boys, organizing theatrical evenings or the distribution of awards, assisting the cafeteria supervisors, polite with parents, good-natured with his classmates, charming with the teachers, blushing, helpful. Never unruly? Never. Never violent? Insolent? Never. Just an odd way, when I had finished my lecture and there was some point he thought remained obscure, of crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair and declaring in his loud, precocious adolescent's voice, "No Sir!" His voice was so sonorous, that the class, by now used to it, waited in anticipation, then burst into laughter. And when I had elucidated the point, he uncrossed his arms and, satisfied, in the same tone, said "Yes Sir!" which again made the class laugh. But would you call that insolence? He just wanted to understand! He didn't like not understanding. And I liked him very much, one of the students I was most attached to.
I took advantage, during a trip to Lahore, Pakistan, of the opportunity to visit Aitchinson College, where he spent a parenthetical two years, before returning to Forest School. Why these two years? Was it because Omar himself, as he later asserted, felt the need to reconnect with his Muslim "roots"? Or was it because his father, Saeed, had to return to Pakistan for business reasons? The question is not unimportant because its answer determines when he began his return to Islam and his future as a Kashmiri militant. What I do know, which supports the idea of a decision by the father, is that Saeed and a cousin created, in Lahore, a new company called Crystal Chemical Factories, and it was when this company failed that the family returned to London. Most important is my discovery that the Forest School (where he was a student from nine to thirteen years old, then again after Aitchinson, from fifteen to seventeen) is a school with a certain religious traditions. At least twice a week all the students have to assemble in the Anglican chapel-a practice that seems not to have posed a problem for the young Omar who, in his second enrollment as well as the first, if only because of his role as "head of house," was always present in the chapel, in the front row, seemingly unperturbed.
So, I visit Aitchinson College. I don't believe, then, that his reasons for being here were tied to his faith or his roots. But all the same, even if Pakistan corresponded, however little, to some desire to return to his ancestors, the reality is that the place would have been ill-chosen. With its perfect lawns, soccer and cricket fields, its beds of hibiscus from Bergerac and La Rochelle, its Olympic-sized pool, its colonnaded verandas, its bamboo screens and its rocking-chairs, with its strict hierarchy of the "lower boys" in short pants and the "grands" who had earned the right to "go into tails" and to wear at last a tail-coat, with its busts of Gladstone and Shelley in the classrooms, its illustrious parliamentarians present at award ceremonies, its soldiers at the entrance saluting in the purest Indian army style-Aitchinson is, in the heart of Pakistan, an enchanted place, an enclave, an aristocratic world preserved from the violence outside, a piece of England, congealed in its decor and conventions, a college more British than the most British of London colleges.
I met the headmaster. I found professors who had known Omar and agreed to share their memories. I was shown pictures of him where he still had that chubby-cheeks, good-boy look, cursed with thick glasses, and sideburns. In one, he is wearing the school uniform, navy blue vest and white, short-sleeved shirt with the V-shaped open collar of the school seniors; he is letting fall a stack of books held by an elastic band as he breaks into childish laughter. In another, he wears a colorful, shiny shirt and jeans with rolled cuffs, making his legs look a little short, and he dances a kind of twist or jerk. "He was a good young man," I'm told by the headmaster and former economics professor, who with his silvery hair is a very elegant double of a French poet friend of mine. Respectful of his "masters." Obliging with his "fellows." He loved poetry and flowers, and the sweetness of life. "Ah! the flowers . . . Who remembers the beauty of the flowers and their perfumed mazes? Often, when my predecessor made his rounds and he came by here to check the color of his pansies"-he bends over a bed of blooming petunias, picks one, grimaces, signals to a gardener who rushes over, and says, simply, with slight disgust: "That's not it, too pink"-"yes, often he was among the pupils my predecessor found sensitive enough to take along. Do you know why he left the college? Because he systematically took sides with the weak, the scapegoats, and since he was a scrapper, it ended in blows. The Professors, who appreciated his mettle and considered him a gentleman, protected him. But, one day, he broke the nose of a nasty kid whose father was a tycoon from Lahore, and then nobody could do anything for him-what a pity! What heartbreak! I'm sure, if we had kept him, we could have prevented this accident. And his manners! What behavior! No Pakistani ever had such manners. No one was ever as faithful to the Aitchinson spirit as Omar Sheikh."
Forgive me, Ruth. Forgive me, Judea. I realize that, to evoke the Sheikh family and the London childhood and adolescence of their son, who became your son's assassin, I've used the same words, or almost, as those which were inspired, in Los Angeles, by the images from your shattered happiness. But what can I do? How can I rid myself of the feeling that these are parallel destinies? Is it my fault that Omar was, too, before dissolving into the quick-lime of perversion and murder, a kind of wonder child? I have a photo of him at the age of ten or twelve. He is wearing the pearl-gray school uniform. An escutcheon. A rose in the lapel. He is holding a trophy. And he has in his smile, in his look, at the same time shy and proud, and especially in his haircut, long and straight and falling in his eyes, something which truly and irresistibly reminds me of pictures of Danny with his football or his baseball bat.
I went to the London School of Economics where Omar enrolled, at the age of eighteen, in the Mathematics and Statistics Department which is, if not the most difficult, at least the one requiring the most assiduity. Attendance normal, there, as well. Grades normal and even brilliant. He who, according to George Paynter, didn't read much at the Forest School began to frequent the library and devour literature, politics, and economic treatises. According to those of his friends I managed to find, he was nice, hard working, obsessed by exams, a good friend, not particularly religious, still not Islamist. Saquib Qureshi, who is also of Pakistani origin and whose recollections are the most precise said: "No, I don't remember seeing him pray . . . It's been a long time, but I think I would remember that . . . He knew, we knew, that we were Muslim . . . Maybe we had the idea that, in different parts of the world, Muslims were being attacked, but we were liberal, not at all proselytizing, we were moderate . . . "
In his spare time he plays chess. He plays better and better. (It occurs to me that Quaissia, his mother's name, is also, in Greek mythology, Cassa, the name of the goddess of chess . . . ) He is seen in the major London chess clubs where he gives the city's best professionals a run for their money. But it's especially at the Three Tuns Pub-a cafe in the heart of the little city that is the London School of Economics-that he is challenged to duels, which he always wins. He has a motto-which, in retrospect, doesn't lack piquancy-borrowed from one of the all time great players, his idol, Aaron Nimzovitch: "The threat is stronger than the execution."
He also boxes. A little karate. He becomes especially interested in arm wrestling, which, in London, seems to attract an impressive number of enthusiasts who, for the most part, remember him-and remember with the precision of people who haven't been overly interviewed and whose memories remain fresh. Frank Pittal, for example. Big Frank Pittal, an acquaintance of Omar's father, who sells womens' shoes at the Whitechapel market, near Wanstead, but whose real passion is organizing arm wrestling tournaments for money.
I find Pittal in his house in Wanstead, cluttered with cartons and dust, the smell of onions and cooking. He shows me pictures of his young self, tin trophies in imitation gold or silver. Together, we go through an old album full of yellowed press clippings about his big matches. Then, suddenly, in a page from the local Portsmouth newspaper, I recognize the young Omar, in an undershirt, his elbow on the table, his face strained, his opponent taller and larger than him, but whose respect Omar seems to hold.
"That's it-September 1993. I think it's his first tournament. He came to see me. 'Hey! Frankie! I want to be in it, I want you to take me into your stable, I'm the best in my college, but now I want to do it professionally." He had seen Sylvester Stallone's movie Over the Top, the story of an arm wrestling champion who, thanks to his arm wrestling skills, succeeds in getting his kid back from a rich, mean father-in-law, and that's what got him started. So I said, 'You don't say! Stallone's movie got me started, too! What a coincidence, it's incredible!' The next Sunday, I went to his house to pick him up in my van, and we went to this pub in the southern suburbs where he arrives with a carton of milk-what class! And a good wrestler to boot! I made a little money on him, believe me. Sometimes the tournaments are for money, sometimes for humanitarian causes. It lasted a year. We became damned good friends. I never would have thought he could do what he did to such a fine man as Daniel Pearl seemed to be. When I saw his face on the TV and the announcer said, 'This is Daniel Pearl's killer,' I swear to you, I didn't believe it! We had such good talks, the two of us, in the van, coming home from matches. We talked about everything. Everything. Except maybe one thing. And even there . . . He was Muslim, I'm Jewish, and-"
"Jewish, really? Omar had a Jewish friend?"
"Of course," Pittal says with an enormous burst of laughter that pulls his head into his shoulders, like a chick. "Jewish or Muslim, it didn't count with him. He didn't see the difference. We were just two good buddies making the rounds of the London pubs. And even on Israel, we could disagree on this or that aspect of the politics, but he never denied Israel's right to exist. Was he religious? Not to my knowledge. He always said, 'I have a lot of respect for your people because, like us, you are merchants.'"
Chess, and arm wrestling. Strategic intelligence and muscle. The combination is uncommon. The young patricians of the London School of Economics observe this well-rounded young Pakistani with astonishment. They come into the school cafeteria, where on certain evenings the left side of the room is arranged like a stage or theater, to admire this impressive man who nobody can beat in chess or in arm wrestling. And I can't help recalling the excitement my classmates and I felt twenty years earlier in Paris, over the performance of one of our fellows. I can't help recalling a television program called Head and Legs where, normally, we played on teams-an intellectual for the head and an athlete for the legs. Until one fine day one of our classmates decided, under the dumbfounded gaze of his comrades, that he would be the first to combine both roles, to form a team all by himself, to play the head, and since he was an equestrian champion, the legs too. Sorry, petit camarade, for the comparison. But in the way Omar's old friends evoke his double talent, in the amazed way they tell me about the chess champion and the muscle man, the ace of the Nimzovitch defense and the athlete, the only man in school who can delight you with a replay of a Kasparov pawn finale or a Spielman sacrifice attack, and the only one as well who can floor any bully looking for trouble, I can't keep from feeling the same emotion we felt, crowded around the few televisions at the ecole Normal Superieure, waiting to see just how far your performance would take you.
"He'll end up a peer of the realm," Saeed Sheikh and Omar's mother Quaissia would say in the time of his glory. "Our son is a marvel, he'll end up knighted by the Queen of England, or become a banker in the city." And it certainly seems as if his teachers and the classmates who remember him did not find such ambition either unreasonable or absurd.
I remember an observation by Olivier Roy, the French specialist in radical Islamism, noting that jihadists who "graduate" from the Saudi or Pakistani madrasas are not that numerous. They pass through, granted. That's where they finish their training. Perhaps for these souls, corrupted by their commerce with the west, it's a kind of trial by fire, or an obligatory rite of passage. But Atta comes from Hamburg. The man with the shoe bomb on the Paris-Miami flight, Richard Colvin Reid, is English and started out in Catholic schools in London. Moussaoui is French, born in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and studied at the university level in France. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin Laden's lieutenant, arrested by the Pakistanis in February 2003 in Islamabad, was educated in the United States. Others are trained in Paris or Zurich, Brussels or Milan. All, or nearly all, come from well-to-do families and have done advanced studies in the major capitals of Europe, often brilliantly. And as for Omar . . .
Yes, Olivier Roy was right. At twenty years old, Omar's inner life is English. His friends are English. His frames of reference are English. The books he reads are in English. We can deplore it. We can try to forget it. We can respond as did the headmaster of the London School of Economics, Anthony Giddens (who, according to England's Daily Telegraph on 27 January 2002, has given, in recent years, three of his top students to al-Qaida) to a French writer asking for access to school or library records: "I don't want to see you or speak to you," said Giddens. "I don't want to know anything about this Omar Sheikh who is ruining my reputation. Let's just forget it happened."
The facts are there. And as always, they're stubborn. This enemy of the West is a product of the West. This fervent jihadist was formed in the school of enlightenment and progress. This raging Islamist who will shout out at his trial that he kidnapped Daniel Pearl because he couldn't stand anymore to see the heads of Arab prisoners forcibly shaved in Guantnamo, this radical who will go berserk at the very idea of being judged not according to the sharia but British law, is a product of the very best English education. This character is both foreign and familiar to us. Here is the radical and banal nature of evil described by Hannah Arendt, which concerns us because it has the unsettling strangeness of mirrors . . . Is terrorism the bastard child of a demonic couple: Islam and Europe?
CHAPTER 3 WHY BOSNIA?.
But there is a second, more personal, reason that Omar fascinates me-and this second reason is Bosnia.
We are still in 1992.
Omar has just been accepted to the London School of Economics.
Physically, he's leaner. He's taken on the physique of an athlete and will keep it until the years of his incarceration in India. He looks older than his years. A young woman who knew him at the Forest School and who still sees him from time to time will tell me in all seriousness that his classmates had wondered " . . . is he older than he says? Maybe it has something to do with the difference between the Christian and Muslim calendars?"