Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

War Comes Home
fully revealed during the investigation of the kidnapping and murder
of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter. The Journal’s South
Asia bureau chief, who was 38 years old, vanished in January 2002
while researching a story on terrorism. In May, police found his
body buried in a nursery on the outskirts of Karachi. Pakistani and
US investigators determined that the reporter lost his life in a joint
operation of Pakistani militants and al-Qaeda. 8
Pearl’s kidnapping was the first violent response of the al-Qaedalinked
Pakistani militant groups to the American attack on Afghanistan.
It came just ten days after President Musharraf’s 12 January speech in
what appeared to be a retaliatory action by defiant Islamic militants.
The murder was not only a retaliation for Musharraf’s action against
Islamic activists, but it was also meant to signal to the United States that
its war against al-Qaeda was far from over and that its treatment of al-
Qaeda prisoners could have serious repercussions for US citizens. The
kidnapping was planned to embarrass General Musharraf, particularly
in light of the fact that it came at a crucial time. Musharraf was due
to meet with President Bush at the White House in the first week of
February, as a reward for his response to the crisis in Afghanistan. 9
The kidnapping was conceived and organized by Ahmed Omar
Saeed Sheikh. 10 The plot included two separate cells, one that
trapped Pearl and publicized the abduction, and another that actually
kidnapped and held him captive. It was mid January 2002 when Sheikh
first met Pearl under the false name of ‘Bashir’. A very articulate man,
he convinced the journalist that he was an acolyte of an Islamic cleric
with whom the reporter was seeking an interview. Following Sheikh’s
directive, Pearl proceeded to Karachi. 11
Pearl was visibly excited about his ‘scoop’ when he left the office of
the Associated Press in Karachi’s posh Clifton district on the afternoon
of 25 January 2002. He had pursued a story on the al-Qaeda network
in Pakistan for several weeks and had been promised an interview
that evening with a Muslim cleric, believed to have close links with
Richard Reid, the ‘shoe bomber’, who was facing trial in the USA for
attempting to blow up a passenger airliner. Reid, a British national who
visited Pakistan shortly before the incident, was said by US officials
to have trained with al-Qaeda. The man Pearl thought he was going
to meet was Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, leader of a shadowy
militant group called Tanzimul Fuqra, which had long been on the US
State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. 12 There was nothing
amiss when Pearl called his wife Mariane, a freelance journalist, a
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