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Authors: Bernard-Henri Lévy

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BOOK: Who Killed Daniel Pearl
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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 Tête
. . . 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.

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