It was dusk on a damp January evening in Karachi when Daniel Pearl walked from his taxi outside the shabby Metropole Hotel and climbed into the back of a white Toyota Corolla car. He shook hands with the young, bearded man in the front seat and the car drove off past the Village Garden restaurant and into the choking traffic. It was the last time the Wall Street Journal reporter was seen alive.
Pearl's disappearance and eventual murder provoked international outrage and signalled the emergence of a new Islamist threat in Pakistan. His case exposes the troubling links between Pakistan's infamous state intelligence service and the underground militant movement.
For several weeks the Wall Street Journal's 38-year-old south Asia bureau chief had been writing about Pakistan's Islamists and their links with al-Qaida and the state intelligence services. When Afghanistan's Taliban regime collapsed in November journalists poured across the border into Kabul. Pearl stayed behind. His French wife, Mariane, was expecting their first child. Afghanistan, he told friends, was just too dangerous.
Instead the genial, hardworking American reporter began to investigate Pakistan's militant underground. The couple, Mariane said later, were on a "quest to bridge the divide between east and west". Her husband uncovered a "charity" linked to both Osama bin Laden and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
In another story he wrote about Jaish-e-Mohammad, a militant group working freely despite a government ban. There is little doubt that, by January, the Pakistani intelligence agencies as well as several leading militants knew exactly who he was and were embarrassed by his work.
His next story, an attempt to trace the background of Richard Reid, the alleged shoe bomber, brought him to Karachi. Pearl met a contact outside the Metropole Hotel at 7pm on January 23. Chaudhry Basheer, as he had introduced himself, spoke impeccable English and appeared friendly, trustworthy and well-connected. In fact, he was Omar Saeed Sheikh, a fiercely bright Islamist militant born in Britain and trained in terror at camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Violent militant
Sheikh, 28, was a leader in Pakistan's violent militant movement and had links with al-Qaida and the ISI. One Pakistani investigator who later interrogated the Briton described him as a "psychopath".
A week later, a series of carefully written emails were sent to American newspapers with a list of demands and photographs showing the journalist in chains and with a gun held to his head. After a month, the US consulate in Karachi received a chilling three-minute videotape. It showed Pearl apparently answering questions from his captors. "My father is Jewish," he says. "My mother is Jewish. I'm Jewish." Suddenly the film cuts to a shot of the man slumped on the floor. A hand reaches into the frame and, in a few brief seconds, cuts his head from his body.
Over the past two months a secret, drawn-out trial at a high security anti-terrorism court in the southern city of Hyderabad has heard how Sheikh cleverly befriended Pearl weeks before he disappeared; how he and several other militants arranged with near-perfect planning to kidnap and murder the journalist; and how Sheikh's fellow kidnappers eventually slipped up and gave him away.
Yesterday, Sheikh and three co-defendants were convicted of kidnap and murder. The former was sentenced to hang, while his co-defendants will spend the next 25 years in jail. But there is much about the case left unexplained in court.
Unlike most Pakistani militants who hail from deprived communities, Sheikh grew up in a middle-class family in east London. He studied at a respected public school where he was an arm-wrestling champion and went on to read mathematics and statistics at the London School of Economics.
But after his first year he dropped out. "In England a boy is free and independent so he, too, became independent and did whatever he thought was right," said his father, Ahmed Saeed Sheikh.
His idealistic young son travelled to Bosnia with an Islamic charity, where extremists put him in touch with Islamists in Pakistan. After training, he was sent into India on his first mission but within weeks he was in jail, accused of kidnapping three Britons and an American.
The ISI, which has long armed and funded the militants in their guerrilla war in Kashmir, reportedly provided a lawyer. But, on the afternoon of New Year's Eve 1999, after five years in jail, he was suddenly flown to the city of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, with two other militants where he was freed in return for the 154 passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines jet.
One of the militants freed with him, Maulana Masood Azhar, went on to establish a new Pakistani militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammad, which, with ISI backing, began fighting in Kashmir.
Sheikh worked closely with him. With his good education and flawless English, the young Briton quickly stood out. "They needed somebody to write things for them in good English and he would help them," said a police investigator. Sheikh read about international relations and tried to explain western government policies to his colleagues as they trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan and fought against the Indian army in Kashmir.
But Sheikh quickly returned to ISI attention. At the time, the agency was backing the Taliban in Afghanistan and directing militant groups in Kashmir. Several sources in the police have confirmed that Sheikh was well-known to senior ISI officers. For two years he travelled regularly to training camps in Afghanistan and undertook missions in Kashmir.
He was known to be in touch with Ijaz Shah, the Lahore-based home secretary of the Punjab and a former ISI officer in charge of handling two militant groups. His contacts also reportedly included Lieutenant-General Mohammad Aziz Khan, a Kashmir-born former deputy chief of the ISI.
"I know people in the government and they know me and my work, but it was not a factor in Pearl's kidnapping," Sheikh told his police interrogators.
He also claimed to know the militants who bombed the Srinagar state assembly in Kashmir in October, killing 38 people, and those who stormed the Indian parliament in Delhi, in December.
His militant credentials were impeccable. "He is committed to his religion. He hates Americans. He told the FBI that," said a source close to the inquiry. Sheikh later tried to convince one of his Pakistani interrogators to join the militants.
After September 11, he travelled to Afghanistan where police believe he met Bin Laden. Soon after the bombing campaign began he returned to Lahore and to his wife, who gave birth to their first child earlier this year. Then he met Pearl.
Professional kidnap
Police were surprised at the "professional" way Sheikh had handled the kidnap. He tricked the journalist into flying down to Karachi for what he thought would be an interview with a reclusive militant leader reportedly linked to Richard Reid. Sheikh would pick up information from him and then close the bait, said the Pakistani investigator.
The kidnappers were split into small cells and did not know all the gang members. "He carried out this operation as an intelligence organisation would, with cut-outs so that no one person knew all the details," the investigator said.
While Sheikh arranged the kidnap, police believe he then handed the journalist over to another cell which carried out the murder. Sheikh himself may never have known the identity of the killers and at least seven suspects are still on the run.
President General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, said in February that Pearl was the victim of "intelligence games". In an extraordinary outburst at a press conference after the video of his murder surfaced, President Musharraf then accused Pearl of being "over inquisitive" and getting "over involved" in the story. Some Pakistani officials, as well as the kidnappers themselves, believed he was spying for the CIA or Mossad, although there is no evidence of that.
Other aspects appeared unusual. One of the kidnappers' demands was for the delivery of several F-16 fighter jets bought by Pakistan from the US in the early 1990s, a deal that was later cancelled. No militant group in Pakistan has ever before shown any interest in the F-16 deal. The kidnappers also demanded the release of Pakistani al-Qaida suspects held by the US at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
As soon as Sheikh's name emerged as a suspect, the ISI tried to limit the damage. On February 5, a detective tracked down Sheikh's aunt in Karachi and, from her telephone, told the young militant to surrender. Sheikh gave himself up, not to police, but to his old ISI contact, Ijaz Shah, by now the home secretary of the Punjab.
For the next week, he was held in secret by the ISI to the consternation of the investigators in Karachi and FBI agents who were desperate to find Pearl alive.
"The police were furious," said a source. "Sheikh gave himself up to Shah because he was someone he knew from ISI."
Sources close to the ISI say its agents spent the week telling Sheikh to keep quiet about his intelligence contacts. Others say that ISI agents wanted to crack the case for themselves. On February 12, he was handed over to the police and two days later told a stunned Karachi court that Pearl had been killed. "As far as I understand he's dead," he said.
As details of Sheikh's interrogation leaked out, Islamabad grew nervous. On February 17, it tried to stop The News, Pakistan's biggest-selling English-language paper, from publishing a story in which Sheikh called the kidnapping a "warning shot" from militants to the government. After the story was printed, the editor was forced to resign and flee the country.
The story proved accurate. "He said splinter groups of jihadis were getting together to do something," a senior police officer said. Within weeks, three brutal suicide attacks led by militant groups thought to be linked to Sheikh claimed more than 30 lives. Police fear more attacks may follow yesterday's verdict.
Pearl's murder now looks like the first strike in a new wave of violent militancy. But despite the verdict, questions remain about Sheikh's links with the ISI and the loyalty of many of the intelligence agency's most powerful officials.
