(2 of 3)
Pakistani investigators and the FBI have illuminated the sequence of events leading to Pearl's kidnapping--but little else. The correspondent arrived in Karachi, a bustling southern port city, on Jan. 22 with his wife Marianne, a French national and freelance journalist who is six months pregnant. Pakistani officials say Pearl had earlier spent a week in a town called Bahawalpur, home to the founder of the banned terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad. On the day he was abducted, Pearl had a midafternoon meeting at the U.S. consulate and then met with Jameel Yusuf, the head of Karachi's Citizen-Police Liaison Committee. During the interview, Pearl received a call on his cell phone and told the caller he was just five minutes away. After leaving Yusuf's office, Pearl took a cab to a restaurant called the Village, reaching there at 6:45 in the evening, three-quarters of an hour before it opened for dinner. His kidnappers presumably picked him up there.
Pakistan's roster of chief suspects includes operatives of Jaish-e-Muhammad and Pir Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, the leader of Jamaat al-Fuqra, an obscure extremist group that has branches in the U.S. The group is thought to have cultivated the shoe bomber Richard Reid's incipient fanaticism while he studied Islam in Pakistan. Pearl, it turns out, had hoped to interview Gilani for a story he was developing about Reid. Last week police raided the home of Pearl's liaison to Gilani, a man who goes by the alias "Arif." But inside they found his relatives mourning him, claiming he had just died in Afghanistan. Police suspect their story may be a ruse.
Gilani turned himself in to Pakistani authorities late last week in Rawalpindi, but his role, if any, in the kidnapping remains unclear. Indeed, a lack of clarity seems the only salient theme of the investigation so far. Many security experts in Pakistan doubt that the kidnappers are professionals. If the first e-mails really came from Pearl's captors, the imprecision (unclear deadlines, flip-flopping accusations) and absurdity of their demands (it's fairly well known that the U.S. does not negotiate with kidnappers) would suggest they are new to the kidnapping and terrorism business. Terry Anderson, an American reporter who was held hostage by Islamic radicals for seven years in Lebanon, said last week that upon his release in 1991, his captors acknowledged that kidnapping had not been a "useful tactic." Though it had attracted press coverage, Anderson noted, the reports focused on the hostages, not the kidnappers' demands.
In the absence of any solid leads, Pakistani officials, embarrassed by Pearl's disappearance and perhaps anticipating the usual farrago of catcalls from across the border in India, have suggested that India had a hand in the kidnapping. Pakistan's presidential spokesman, Major General Rashid Quereshi, spoke darkly of "an Indian linkage" to the kidnapping and suggested that Pearl's abduction might be a "totally stage-managed event to defame Pakistan." He was probably referring to a series of calls made after the kidnapping from a suspect's cell phone to Indian politicians--calls security experts speculate the kidnappers made to lead the investigation astray. Indian officials dismissed Quereshi's charge as "ridiculous."