VIDEO REVEALS THE HIDEOUS SACRIFICE OF CAPTIVE REPORTER; PEARL MURDER GRUESOME TAPE SHOWS AMERICAN SPEAKING INTO CAMERA AS UNKNOWN KILLER SLITS HIS THROAT, THEN BEHEADS HIM Peter Popham In Delhi
The Independent (London) First Edition; NEWS; Pg. 2
February 23, 2002, Saturday
Kidnappers released this photo of Pearl in shackles; Daniel Pearl was a victim of his kidnappers' hatred for America /Getty Images
THE GRUESOME video of Daniel Pearl's execution reached the office of the government of Sindh province in southern Pakistan at about 11pm on Thursday, 21 February. It arrived only hours before the beginning of the great Muslim holiday of Eid, the culmination of the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.
The principal event of Eid in the Islamic world is the sacrifice of goats and sheep - a ritual commemorating the rescue of Isaac from the blade of Abraham who sent a sheep to take the child's place.
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Daniel Pearl, the South Asia correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, was in Karachi with his pregnant wife, Mariane, trying to piece together links between the British "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, now in custody in America, and Islamic extremists in Pakistan, when he was kidnapped. He disappeared on 23 January. Three days later, e-mails reached the work stations of western media with photograph attachments showing Mr Pearl in chains and with a gun to his head. One more e -mail was dispatched on 30 January, warning he would be killed within 24 hours if action was not taken on their demands - chiefly the return for trial in Pakistan of Pakistani al-Qa'ida suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had already made it plain there was no room for negotiation. The deadline was extended to 48 hours but the kidnappers made no further attempts to get in touch. Nobody knows when Mr Pearl was finally murdered. But the timing of the delivery of the brief, horrific video has a ghastly resonance. The principal event of Eid in the Islamic world is the sacrifice of goats and sheep - a ritual commemorating the rescue of Isaac from the blade of Abraham who sent a sheep to take the child's place. In backyards from Casablanca to Mindanao, the legs of billy goats and rams are bound, a pit is dug in the ground to receive the blood, then the head of the house presses the animal's neck towards the pit and slits it. And the video, too, showed a swift, ceremonial killing - the killing in captivity of Danny Pearl. According to one who has seen it, the tape shows Mr Pearl speaking directly into the video camera, and saying: "I am a Jew, my mother is a Jew." Then the hand of his killer - only his hands are shown - comes into the frame and slits his throat. Like the ram and the billy goat at Eid, he is then decapitated.
It was impossible, hearing how Danny Pearl died, not to recall that this, the swiftest and yet most primitive method of execution, has over and over been the method of choice for these terrorists. In 1995, Islamic militants in Kashmir - probably members of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, kidnapped six western trekkers. All but two vanished without trace. Of the others, one escaped, the other was decapitated.
On IC-914, the Indian Airlines Kathmandu-Delhi flight hijacked in December 1999, a business class passenger had his throat slit and the rest of the passengers had to watch him die. Identical executions, using box cutters, appear to have occurred on at least one of the hijacked planes crashed in the US on 11 September.
It is possible the publicising of Mr Pearl's murder on the eve of Eid was a chance event: the terrorists used a Karachi-based Pakistani journalist to deliver the video; he received it a couple of days earlier, but it took him 24 hours to convince the US Consulate in Karachi to take him seriously enough to view it.
But one thing seems beyond doubt: this was not a kidnapping in the classic sense.
Rather it was used to publicise what its agents regarded as a gross American injustice; and then to exact symbolic punishment against a single individual, not because he was a journalist, but because he was an American, and even better, an American Jew; and thus a symbolic representative of both groups the fanatics involved regard as the archenemy.
One of the three men in jail in Karachi on suspicion of involvement in the kidnapping, Fahad Naseem, allegedly confessed that Omar Sheikh, the British national considered to be the brains behind the crime and who is also in custody, told him that Mr Pearl had been abducted because he was a "Jew working against Islam."
The abduction and murder of Danny Pearl bear the scary and paradoxical hallmarks of an al-Qa'ida action: patience, guile, intelligence, capacity for planning, mastery of modern technology, including use of the internet, mobile phones, digital cameras and video - all combined with primitive and remorseless brutality.
In the course of Mr Pearl's research in Karachi he contacted a former middle -ranking official with ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence agency, who put him in touch with Omar Sheikh, the former public schoolboy and London School of Economics drop-out, who had kidnapped four westerners in Delhi in 1994.
Sheikh, connected both to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and another group, Jaish- e -Mohammed, played his hand deftly. As in Delhi nearly eight years before, he stepped back into his western shoes. He shaved off his beard, and arranged to meet Mr Pearl in Rawalpindi sometime in January.
As a former east London resident, Sheikh would have a keen ear for ethnic- cum -religious nuances, and would quickly have concluded that Mr Pearl was probably Jewish. Jewish and American, exactly what was called for: a sacrificial lamb. According to the testimony of one of his 1994 victims (all of whom were eventually released unharmed) Sheikh is virulently anti-semitic.
Shortly before he disappeared, Danny Pearl told a Karachi businessman, Jamal Yousuf, that he arranged to meet his contact at Karachi's Village restaurant on the night of the 23rd. The man who called Mr Pearl on his mobile while he was sitting in Jamal Yousuf's office is believed to be Amjad Faruqi: a Harkat-ul-Mujahideen terrorist now actively being sought by the police. He it was who promised to escort Mr Pearl for his clinching interview. It was the last rendezvous Danny Pearl was to keep.
