We know of half a dozen pseudonyms for Zakarias Moussaoui, the Franco-Moroccan who was Mohammed Atta's roommate and would have been the 20th hijacker in the September 11 attacks had he not been arrested in Minnesota a month earlier.
In addition to five credit cards, three passports, three social security numbers and birth dates, two addresses in London and another two in the United States, a plethora of e-mail connections, cell phone numbers, and bank accounts, Omar himself has at least seventeen aliases-and these are only the ones I am aware of: Mustafa Ahmad, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, Mustafa Muhammed Ahmed, Sheik Syed, Mustafa Sheikh Saeed, Omar Saiid Sheikh, Shaykh Saiid, Chaudhry Bashir, Rohit Sharma, Amir Sohail, Arvindam, Ajay Gupra, Raj Kumar, R. Verma, Khalid, P. Singh, and Wasim!
That said, I nonetheless now have a clear idea of the state of the investigation.
In short, three waves of arrests: one in February, the result of tracing the e-mail addresses; a second three months later at the beginning of May, following the attack at the Sheraton; and the most recent, in the Defence neighborhood.
Eight conspirators out of seventeen behind bars, among them the mastermind of the crime, the Yemini assassin, the boss of the team guarding Pearl at the house, the man in charge of shooting the video, and the one who had it in his possession.
And still at large, the two other Yemenis. Mussadiq and Abdul Samat, the two as yet not clearly identified members of the third cell. Ramzi (who will end up dying, at least officially, on 19 December 2002, with six other terrorists in the explosion of an apartment house in the east Karachi suburbs, where the Lashkar produced explosives in a clandestine workshop). At large as well is Mansur, the man who made the last two phone calls to Danny. (According to one report, when the Pakistani police turn up at his home, on 15 February, they find only his brothers, his wife, his son and two friends. "Mansur's not here," they say. "Mansur just infiltrated the Jammu Kashmir"-a way of saying, in code, that he is under ISI control, according to Abdul.) Also at large, Arif: According to another report, the police, at about the same time, went to arrest him at his home in Bahawalapur, in the south. The whole family is there, in tears and formal mourning. "Hashim Qadeer is dead," they say. "Hashim Qadeer left for the Afghan front and Allah the Merciful called him to his bosom . . . the tomb? no tomb . . . the body? no body . . . Hashim died a hero, no, better, a martyr, and everyone knows martyrs don't necessarily have a grave on earth, because they go directly to Heaven, between the angels and the virgins . . . " At large also, of course, is Saud Memon, the proprietor of the land.
And that's when I arrive at the last, and most fruitful, observation.
Every time one of the newspapers, having released some information and so dropped a morsel of truth our way, asks the authorities for a confirmation or at least a commentary, every time you ask a cop, or a high-ranking civil servant, or even the governor of the province, if it is true that Fazal, or Bukhari, or Akram Lahori have been found and put behind bars, interrogated, you are regularly treated to obfuscations that vary only depending on the circumstances.
Thus: "Fazal Karim, don't know him . . . Bukhari, never heard of him . . . Zobair Chishti, the accomplice, never seen nor heard anything about him . . . We demand you tell your readers it is by error, a very gross and regrettable error, that your newspaper, in the editions of such and such dates, found it necessary to write that we are holding Mr. X, Y, or Z, in one way or another involved in the kidnapping of the journalist Daniel Pearl . . . "
Or: "Yes, of course, we know who he is . . . But, just a minute here! MPO! Maintenance of Public Order! this preventive law that grants us, as policemen, the power to incarcerate antigovernment elements without telling anyone! Perhaps the people you are alluding to are in our custody . . . or in the custody of another agency . . . But we have nothing to say regarding your question . . . We have the right-indeed, the right-to make no comment on this information . . . "
Or, even more subtle: "Yes, of course we know them . . . Yes, of course they are suspects . . . But this trial is complicated enough without introducing new suspects who can only hold up the process of arriving at the truth . . . So, for these suspects allegedly, but only allegedly, guilty, we have a legal status which is a Pakistani specialty: detained but not charged, in prison but not indicted, identified, if you like, but officially unknown . . . We realize they may bear some responsibility for this affair . . . The press is entitled, within limits and because we are indulgent, to report this possibility. But we refuse to confirm it . . . In fact, we refuse to confirm anything . . . And even this declaration that we're making to you at present, we're making it without making it and insist you record it as coming from an 'anonymous source.' Understand?"
And the result is this Associated Press dispatch of 18 August, concerning Lahori and Bukhari: "The Pakistani authorities are not aware of their detention."
Or this declaration given by Manzoor Mughal, "chief investigator" of the Pearl case, to the Agence France Presse the following day when asked if there had been any arrests after those of Omar and the three members of the first cell: "We have arrested no one, apart from the four who have appeared before the Court and been judged. And as for this story about the 'Yemenis,' I say, and I repeat, no Arab has been implicated, much less arrested in the context of this case."
Or this, a filler from the 15 July News: "The authorities deny that Fazal Karim is being detained in their hands."
This note, in the following day's Dawn, concerning Fazal Karim and Chishti: "The decision not to announce the arrest of other suspects was made at the highest level, as early as 16 May, by the police and the Minister of the Interior of Sindh."
Kamran Khan's 15 July citation in the Washington Post of a high official who said that the arrest of Lahori, however "crucial," had occurred too late, during the "last phase" of the trial, well into the pleadings. Any official confirmation of the arrest would risk derailing the entire proceeding, and that is why it was out of the question to "make it public."
Or: The citation of still another official, cited "anonymously" in a Dawn article by editorialist Anwar Iqbal, who declared, "We know who killed Pearl, but we don't want to reveal it. The trial is already a nightmare, the suspects are forever threatening officials. We don't want to go through all this again."
No need to go into the perverse effect this sort of declaration has on the trial proceedings.
No need-or is there?-to delve into the case of this man, Omar Sheikh, who, we can assume, would not have been convicted on the same charges and might have pleaded extenuating circumstances if the arrest of accomplices-such as those who had been in charge of the guards, or had called the Yemenis, or physically held Danny while the Yemeni slit his throat-had been taken into consideration.
No matter, then, because it is not my intention to pardon the mastermind of the crime, and I don't think the presence, or absence, of a Lahori, of a Bukhari, of a Chishti, would exonerate Omar in the least of the immense responsibility of having conceived and planned the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. No matter, then, the-to say the least-bizarre course of a trial that was, on many counts, an onslaught of formalities where they nonetheless chose to ignore essential witnesses, major protagonists of the crime, even though they were under arrest and had in most cases confessed, and one needed only to cite their confessions.
What interests me for the time being is the strange, almost rhetorical, system for the treatment of information that results, every time, not in clarification but in even greater vagueness and mystery.
What bothers me is that at the very moment when the affair is being treated by process of law, every effort seems to be made to render it perfectly unintelligible. (The best observers, the most moderate and the most critical politicians, all end up no longer knowing themselves if there were actually any Yemenis; whether Lahori is dead or alive; and if the story of Fazal Karim leading the investigators to the spot where Danny was buried isn't ultimately a piece of disinformation reworked and repeated three or four times.) It's all the same, making the whole case extremely simple. (We have a culprit, and he's a good culprit; we have an assassin who is a perfect assassin; we don't want to introduce any new elements into the trial that would oblige us to stop everything: And after the trial, we don't want to take any new elements into consideration, because then we would have to start all over again.) As though-right from the start-everyone had the same objective in mind: make the nightmare, not of the death of Danny but of the trial of his murderers, as brief as possible.
As though everyone-judges, police, political powers as well as, with very few exceptions, the press and public opinion-had tacitly agreed to get rid of the Pearl affair as rapidly as possible.
As though this affair contained a secret, a heavy and terrible secret, and that every means had to be employed to prevent this secret from being revealed.
CHAPTER 3 A SHADOWY AFFAIR.
I contact one of the lawyers for the defense.
His name is Khawaja Naveed Ahmed.
He's defending, not Omar, but Sheikh Adil and Fahad Naseem, his accomplices in Cell no. 2, the only ones tried at the same time as Omar, in the same batch, so to speak-receiving twenty five years imprisonment each.
He pleads extenuating circumstances.
Like me, he has a list of all the "new elements," the "detained but not indicted" suspects, Bukhari, Karim and, now, this Yemeni executioner, whose legal status is so unclear. All of them are reasons, for him as for Omar's lawyer, Abdul Waheed Katpar, to protest a parody of justice: "How can you judge one without judging the others? How can you get to the bottom of a crime when the man who held the weapon (the Yemeni), the one who assisted him (Fazal Karim), and the one who gave the order (Bukhari) are not even involved in the procedure? Is the fact of having bought a camera, or scanned a shot, or sent an e-mail, is this really more important than having decapitated a man or having forcefully im-mobilized him while doing so? This trial doesn't make any sense!"
I understand, from another source, that Khawaja is a militant lawyer, tending to sympathize with the cause of the jihadists he defends.
I'd heard about his declarations, fulminating against Musharraf's alignment with the United States and the human rights violations of the combined forces of the Pakistani Rangers and the FBI inspectors.
I know he protested a police raid during which "foreign" policemen forced the sister of one alleged terrorist-as it turns out, Kulsum Bano, Bukhari's sister-to open the door, thereby allowing them to look at her: how dare they! How could someone so flout another's faith and modesty? Is there a cause in this world that authorizes men to so violate a woman, if only with their eyes?
We've seen lawyers like this in Europe, in the days of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades in Italy.
I knew some of them a little-such as Klaus Croissant in Germany, whom I met with Michel Foucault-these specialists of the defense of breaking ranks, of the diversion against the bourgeoisie by the bourgeois law itself.
And in this case, there are elements that make me suspect Khawaja was the source of the hunger strike his two clients and Omar Sheikh undertook when rumors of new arrests in April and May began to circulate.
However, it's not because of this that I decide to seek him out.
Although . . . A voice, in this country smothering under the unspoken, that presumes to break the omerta . . . A voice of one who, for whatever reason, stops behaving as though the murder of Danny were a simple affair ending in a show trial . . . Why not?
He receives me in his smart, well-kept office in the Sharah e-Faisal area, in the heart of modern Karachi.
Bearded men in the stairwell. In the waiting room, bearded men. Along the wall, in the hallway, around a large color photo of Srinagar, the capital of "occupied" Kashmir, more bearded men, but they're more elegant- reminding me of Saeed Sheikh, Omar's father, the evening I caught him in front of his home in London: the portraits of the senior Khawajas, father and grandfather no doubt, the founders of the firm. Khawaja Naveed Ahmed is a modern lawyer. His English is perfect.
Like all of his colleagues bustling around him, he has the look of a young New York attorney: tie undone, shirt sleeves rolled up, a confident and forthright countenance, the smile and the laugh of a friendly fellow. He's welcoming to the French writer working on a novel about Pakistan. But his firm obviously specializes in the defense of Islamists.
"Of course all these people are in the custody of the authorities," he begins. "They can deny it all they want. This summer, we heard again the 'force's law officer,' Anwar Alam Subhani, who denied that the Sindh police had ever heard of the arrest of Karim and Bukhari. But there's no doubt about it. And here's proof-this is a document concerning Karim that I give you permission to publish. I'm sure you'll find it interesting."
And over his desk, piled high with faxes, e-mails, and cardboard case files overflowing with papers, he hands me an amazing document: it's a sheet of notebook paper, covered on both sides with minuscule writing in a cramped hand, signed-in Urdu and, below that, using the Latin alphabet- by "Mazharul Hasan, son of Mohammed Sadiq, Security Cell 19." Khawaja starts to translate and I take notes.
"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?
"For a Pakistani, there's a decisive difference. Some of them-the HUM and the HUJI, the Harkat ul-Mujahideen and the Harkat ul-Jihad-al-Islami-have in common that they are notoriously linked to the army and the secret services. You see, here on my chart, the arrow runs towards the top, meaning Islamabad. Whereas the Lashkar is a relatively free electron that nobody minds using as a cover. That's what its being on the left margin of the page signifies."
He bursts out laughing.
"It looks complicated to you? No, no, in every hypothesis, there's a very simple constant. You have, there"-he stops and points to the ceiling, snatching the sheet back from me at the same time and quickly putting it under a stack of papers, "people who have known everything and supervised everything, right from the start. People in high places who have always known where the body was and who decided, at a given time, to release the information by playing the Fazal card. The rest, all the rest, would be, if this is right, just an act."
He says much more, of course. I am oversimplifying. But as I listen to him, I'm thinking about the very strange story of the death of Riaz Basra, who was chief of the Lashkar i-Janghvi before Akram Lahori, and who died in an ambush last May, two days, as if by a coincidence, before the names of Fazal and Bukhari were put into circulation. Abdul explained to me that there never was any ambush. In reality, Basra was already in the hands of the services, and had been for several months, for reasons that had nothing to do with the Pearl affair. Materially speaking, there couldn't have been an ambush, and the man could only have been cold-bloodedly executed: because, in fact, he was being held as Fazal and Bukhari are held today; and they suddenly decided-two days, I repeat, before the arrest of Fazal and Bukhari-that it would be better to make him disappear. Why? What were they afraid to see him do or hear him say? Were they afraid he would protest that they were flattering his group by attributing to it a role in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl? Were they afraid Basra would say: "Look here, I'm the chief and until you hear otherwise, I am aware of what people in my group are doing and not doing! What is this cock-and-bull tale about Fazal and Bukhari being involved at the heart of an affair that's either none of our business or in which we were mere subcontractors?" In other words, was there a risk that Basra would blow the whole operation that Khawaja had just described and thereby make it obvious that the responsibility for the crime rested squarely on the shoulders of the HUM and the HUJI-the two groups they were trying to extricate from the game?
I'm thinking of another friend, a journalist at a Karachi daily, who told me that, at around the same time, the 18 or 20 of May, which was also the time of Fazal's arrest and when Lashkar was put in the forefront, he and many of his colleagues received a strange phone call from an organization that none of them could quite catch the name of. Maybe the "Hezbullah Alami" . . . Or the "al-Saiqua" . . . Or maybe "al Saiqua" renamed "Hezbullah Alami" . . . The caller claimed triple responsibility for the 17 March attack on the Protestant church of Islamabad, the 8 May suicide operation against the French engineers at the Sheraton, and, finally, the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl. "The HUM and the HUJI had nothing to do with these things," said the mysterious caller. "The operation was planned by a 100% anti-Musharraf organization. We are that 100% anti-Musharraf organisation. We are 100% angry with the politics of Musharraf, who has become the Americans' lap dog. And here is the best proof, that only we can supply: The cadaver found at Gulzar e-Hijri is not Daniel Pearl's. The Americans are well aware of this, and that's why they have never made public the results of the DNA tests run on the skeleton."
Propaganda, obviously. Manoeuvre immediately exposed. But isn't it the same strategy? The same desire to confuse the issue? Another effort to divert suspicion from all the groups related in one way or another to the Pakistani government and the ISI?
I watch Khawaja.
All of a sudden he seems strange.
Too jovial, too self-satisfied.
And I wonder what game, ultimately, he is playing by planting these doubts in my mind.
Because, after all, shouldn't it be in the interest of the attorney for Sheikh Adil and Fahad Naseem, who both belong to Jaish e-Mohammed, to turn the spotlight, instead, on the Lashkar?
And how can he at once use the arrest of Fazal to demand a retrial for Omar and then, in the same breath, imagine the same Fazal is an agent who has been manipulated?
After all, perhaps he's the one who's trying to misinform me.
Or perhaps Khawaja thinks the best way of exonerating his client is to bury the crime in an immense plot, indemonstrable, indecipherable, that goes all the way up to the highest level of the State.
I think of his main argument: Why didn't Fazal, or the "special informer," go to the Americans to claim the reward rather than end up in prison? There could be a simple explanation: Fazal is really guilty, he really held Danny's neck so the Yemeni could begin his work, and he couldn't go see the Americans and thereby take the risk of giving himself up and ending up in the electric chair.
I think about Omar. I don't understand his attitude either. In my mind I go over all his declarations, during and after his trial, that I found yesterday with Abdul. Suddenly I find them very restrained, very sensible. And, apart from obligatory provocations for their own sake, in the end rather reasonable. Why doesn't he himself protest this scandal of the "detained but not indicted" more vehemently? Why, if Khawaja's last hypothesis is right, don't we hear him shouting that he's being made the fall guy for a crime committed by many and, perhaps, with the support of people in high places?
It's all becoming so complex . . .
So terribly contradictory, dizzyingly so . . .
An imbroglio. In the true sense of the term, a nebula where I have the feeling of watching the cloud of dust around the mystery of the Pearl affair become denser and denser . . .