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CNN: Special Investigations Unit
The Journalist and the Jihadi
Aired February 10, 2007 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(NEWSBREAK)
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): An American journalist, a Muslim terrorist, with similar backgrounds but conflicting ideas, two remarkable journeys that put them on a collision course towards kidnap and murder.
We uncover stories never heard, images never seen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... tough streets of Baghdad.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... on thin ice.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gang members are driving down this street...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... then walked up...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... a deadly risk.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can hear and see the choppers.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: Now Christiane Amanpour, "The Journalist and the Jihadi."
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I had a dream the night that Daniel was kidnapped, and the dream was that he was in some kind of a troubled situation and he was very scared. He felt like he's going to die, the way I saw in his face.
AMANPOUR: The September 11 attack on the World Trade Center was an act of war and terror. One of the world's most distinguished newspapers, "The Wall Street Journal," is based just across the street.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: John Bussey (ph) of "The Wall Street Journal" is in the area. Let's go to John.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are gaping holes in the World Trade Center. This is the most horrific scene I've ever seen. Bodies have begun falling from the building.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, my God!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There is such intense smoke, people either are falling or they are leaping to escape this smoke. It is as horrific as you would imagine.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: In its aftermath, every media outlet mobilized its reporters to find out who was behind it. Daniel Pearl of "The Wall Street Journal" was already based in Asia. Hours after the twin towers fell, he began tracking the story until he became part of it.
This is the story of a passionate journalist and a shrewd terrorist, a reporter who happened to be Jewish and the Islamic jihadi who set him up for slaughter.
Daniel Pearl spent his formative years in Los Angeles. He grew up in Encino, in a tightly-knit Jewish family with two sisters and high-achieving academic parents. His father is a computer science professor and his mother a software engineer.
RUTH PEARL, DANIEL'S MOTHER: Danny was interested in everything. And this was from childhood -- his interest in music, his interest in cooking, his interest in soccer. We had a diary of him when he was 10 years old, and his sister counted 10 activities that he was doing at the time.
MICHELLE PEARL, DANIEL'S SISTER: He, you know, played soccer and he played violin. It was the other main aspect of Danny's constantly practicing his violin and involved in music in any way he could be.
RUTH PEARL: I remember vividly sitting by the piano, 4-and-a- half years old, reading music. Music came before reading to Danny.
JUDEA PEARL, DANIEL'S FATHER: He was trained as a classical violinist, and even in high school, he was thinking that -- about the possibility of him becoming professional violinist. And eventually, he changed to country music, to fiddle, to mandolin.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
TODD MACK, FELLOW MUSICIAN, RADIO PRODUCER: Welcome back to the "Off the Beaten Track Radio Hour." My name is Todd Mack, and I'm your host this and every Thursday from 10:00 to 11:00 PM right here on WKZE 98.1 FM. Tonight we are showcasing the music of Danny Pearl.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No doubt Danny could have made a living as a musician, and a good living, I think, because of his classical training and his love of so many different styles of music and his ability to absorb that and incorporate that into his playing. He was incredibly versatile.
JUDEA PEARL: But eventually, he decided wants to be a journalist. RUTH PEARL: He started a newspaper at Stanford which is still in existence. It's called "The Commentator." And possibly, that was the experience that tilted him into journalism.
AMANPOUR: Next, Pearl's passion for the Muslim world.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERT FRANK, REPORTER, "WALL STREET JOURNAL," COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND: He had a reputation here in the U.S. as "Danny of Arabia."
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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: At Stanford University, Daniel developed an interest in international issues and began to travel and explore human rights.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DANIEL PEARL: American Jews don't know what they can do to help. They write letters, and they don't know what else that they can do.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nobody knows it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PAUL STEIGER, MANAGING EDITOR, "WALL STREET JOURNAL": Danny came to the paper, I think around 1990, from "The Berkshire Eagle, a good to small paper in the mountains of Massachusetts. And he was a hit from the beginning.
AMANPOUR: Journalist Asra Nomani, a Muslim woman, worked with him at "The Journal."
ASRA NOMANI, FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE: He was definitely unorthodox. I mean, I think he was the first "Wall Street Journal" reporter with a ponytail, and he always wore the craziest ties.
I was the Muslim daughter of India. He was Jewish son of Israeli father, family that had made its roots now in Israel. But we never -- it was never dividing line between us.
AMANPOUR: In London, Omar Sheikh, another young man, was also being brought up in a middle-class suburb. He was 10 years younger than Daniel, a Muslim and of Pakistani origin, but born and brought up in Britain. His father owned a garment business. Omar studied at an elite English private school.
GEORGE PAYNTER, OMAR SHEIKH'S TEACHER, FOREST SCHOOL, LONDON: Omar stood out. We do have dozens of pupils passing under our spell, as it were, every year, but Omar stood out partly because of his physical presence, although he was never intimidating, partly because he was, as it were, an old English gentleman in many respects. His manners were impeccable. ALEX HANNAFORD, SCHOOL FRIEND AND JOURNALIST: I was in the year below Omar at school. He was known as the hardest, the toughest guy in school, and he would get into fights with boys sort of, you know, three years older than him and win. I mean, he was a tough clipper (ph).
PAYNTER: We gave him a scholarship, 11-plus (ph), which indicates, of course, we've got a very bright young man here.
HANNAFORD: So he was at the top of the school, but he certainly wasn't the model student that you'd kind of imagine.
PAYNTER: Omar also did rather well outside the classroom in other fields. He was, for example, London prep schools champion of chess for two years running.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY, AUTHOR, "WHO KILLED DANIEL PEARL?": His sees life as a big chess play. If you are (INAUDIBLE) Freudian, you must know that his mother bears the name of the goddess of chess in Greek mythology, Caissa.
HANNAFORD: And he was obsessed with strength. He would work his arms out all the time because he was obviously involved in arm wrestling and things like that.
LEVY: (INAUDIBLE) of young Omar Sheikh in English pubs. He's an arm wrestler (INAUDIBLE) in the smoke, with the noise, with so much hatred on his face against these young English boys, a mixture of hatred and love with this England, this Western world.
LEECENT "THE FORCE," FORMER ARM WRESTLING CHAMPION: Very strong. We would call it inside hook (INAUDIBLE) risk (INAUDIBLE) like that. He was very good in that position. So basically, when you're arm wrestling, just make sure you don't get into the hook position.
NICK FIELDING, SENIOR REPORTER, "THE SUNDAY TIMES," LONDON: I think he is very, very dominated by a desire to control his immediate environment, his circumstances. And chess and arm wrestling both, in a certain way, one intellectually, the other one physically, two sides of the same coin of a very controlling person.
AMANPOUR: It's the mid-'90s, and Daniel Pearl is emerging as a journalist of great promise and potential. His bosses reward him by giving him his first foreign posting. He is transferred to London as a correspondent for the Middle East. For the next few years, he travels and writes extensively about an area in which he has a growing interest.
ROBERT FRANK, REPORTER, "WALL STREET JOURNAL," COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND: He had a reputation here in the U.S. as "Danny of Arabia" because in his coverage of the Middle East, people knew him as a guy who wrote about Islamic culture all the time, had a great deal of sympathy for Iran and the plight of people around the world, especially Muslims in the Middle East.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So he loved Iran and didn't feel that there was any -- animosity toward him for being either American or a Jew.
AMANPOUR: He goes there 13 times.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He was excited about learning about Islam, discovering a new kind of people that we thought about them one way, and he had discovered another way.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: U.S. missiles have destroyed the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in northern Khartoum. The Clinton administration has accused the factory of producing chemical weapons for Osama bin Laden. Reports are still coming in...
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Daniel Pearl's reports often challenge official U.S. government statements.
STEIGER: After the al Qaeda bombing in Khartoum, U.S. forces took out this factory. Well, Danny went flying in there and spent weeks poking around the soil, looking for evidence to either support or knock down that theory. In the end, he came to the conclusion that the evidence was very scant to support that theory, and wrote a story saying just that.
FRANK: This was totally against the American party line, and the government was furious at this story.
AMANPOUR: Daniel Pearl and Omar Sheikh share similar privileged backgrounds. But as Daniel strives to explain the Islamic world to his skeptical American readership, Omar begins withdrawing from secular British culture and embracing militant Islam. They were on separate paths that would later collide.
When we return, the roots of jihad, West meets East, and the mystery of Omar Sheikh.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Carrying an effigy of Salman Rushdie, it was at Westminster, under the shadow of Parliament that, in front of the cameras, they made their point.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: It's the late '80s. Muslim students in Britain are coming under the influence of Islamic groups whose religious fervor has been ignited by Ayotollah's Khomeini's fatwa on the writer Salman Rushdie. He is accused of insulting the Prophet Mohammed. There are burnings of his book, "The Satanic Verses," throughout Britain. An aggressive brand of Islam emerges, unchecked and unchallenged, with dangerous implications for British society. In late 1992, Omar is admitted to the prestigious London School of Economics to study applied mathematics and economics. By the early '90s, Muslim student organizations are seeking new recruits at campuses such as this one at the University of London. Omar is influenced by these events.
LEVY: He comes from a rich family, wealthy, very well educated, going through one of the best English high schools, London School of Economics, a perfect product of the encounter of Islam and Western world. This is the mystery of Omar Sheikh.
AMANPOUR: In the same year, Omar and a few of his classmates are instrumental in establishing a prayer room for Muslim students in the basement of the LSE. This new sense of Islamic identity soon has a cause, the war in Bosnia, with its savage ethnic cleansing and the massacre of Muslims while the West looks on.
FIELDING: He, in a sense, was on the cusp of that wave of indignation, that feeling the first time of identity as a Muslim amongst these young British Muslims. And that led him in taking the decision with his family's consent to travel to Bosnia to offer relief to an extremely imperiled community of Muslims right in the heart of Europe.
LEECENT: One time he said to me that when there's a war in Bosnia, he said that he'd like to go out there and just help out, see what he can do, because he just feels helpless.
FIELDING: He clearly came into contact with a number of the Arab fighters who recently had been in Afghanistan and Pakistan and had come to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs. Some of those fighters are the people that told him he should move off to Pakistan as quickly as he could and get military training and really become a serious jihadi.
AMANPOUR: Rather than continue his studies, Omar goes to Pakistan and Afghanistan for military training. He goes all the way, becoming a warrior, a professional jihadi.
FIELDING: He joins an organization known then as Harkat-al- Mujahideen, one of the most prominent of the jihadi organizations, fighting primarily in Kashmir at that stage against the Indians.
Omar Sheikh was given a mission to travel to India by senior figures within the Harkat-al-Mujahideen organization. They were very concerned about one person in particular, a man known as Massood Azhar, who was a very prominent jihadi and was imprisoned in India. The idea of sending 0mar Sheikh there was to take some prisoners and effectively use them as a bargaining chip for the release of Massood Azhar.
He did exactly as he was instructed, almost nonchalantly. And the remarkable thing about it is that all the people were kidnapped in India. None of it was done through violence. It was all done through him convincing them to get into a car with him. And at that point, one of his accomplices would pull out a gun and the person would be kidnapped. As a result of a search of the area, the police then found some of the hostages.
AMANPOUR: The hostages are rescued in a shoot-out, and Omar Sheikh is wounded.
FIELDING: Omar Sheikh was taken to hospital, and lying in his hospital bed still, he gives his first public interview, one of the most extraordinarily arrogant interviews that you can possibly imagine. This man has no remorse, no concern, no regrets.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE)
OMAR SHEIKH: Not exactly (INAUDIBLE) I'm a British national.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you regret whatever you've done?
SHEIKH: No.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: But there is one subject he will not discuss, his relationship with Pakistan's intelligence machine, the Inter Services Intelligence, or the ISI.
LEVY: Very strangely for an English citizen, when he was in jail, he did not receive so many visits of the English consul, but he received regular visits of the military attache of the Pakistani embassy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He was a man of ISI.
AMANPOUR: While Omar Sheikh is in prison in India, Daniel Pearl is living in London and often spends time in Paris on his way to and from the Middle East. On one of his trips, he meets a French journalist, who is to become his wife. Her name, Mariane van Neyenhoff.
MARIANE PEARL, JOURNALIST: I was born in Paris. My mother's Cuban. My father's Dutch. I'm a Buddhist. You know, there's just, like, all this exotic stuff. And I think when he met me (INAUDIBLE) it was a reflection of his desire to be this universal person.
I met Danny in a party in Paris. It was a birthday party, and I was dancing with my mother. And I guess he liked that. And my mother is Cuban, so a really good dancer.
Went to see him, you know, in London, and -- you know, and I went to pick him up at "The Wall Street Journal," at his office. And you know, it had -- "The Wall Street Journal" has, like, you know, this cubicle, like that. All the reporters have their little thing. And Danny had his, but getting to his little cubicle, and you know, (INAUDIBLE) big scroll of Ayatollah Khomeini, you know. I mean, that's, like -- you know, it's a scene in "The Journal" because everybody else doesn't have that kind of stuff. So the first weekend, he had found this crazy bike trip in Cannes. You know, he was, like, one surprise after the other. He was like -- like no one I ever knew, you know? Really. That's when -- you know, that's when we -- we really clicked.
He came and visited me in Paris, and then we never separated again.
AMANPOUR: Daniel and Mariane are soon married.
MARIANE PEARL: You know the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery (INAUDIBLE) "The Little Prince." He wrote, Love is not to look at each other in the eye but to look together in the same direction, you know? And that's exactly, I think, what was the -- you know, the glue, you know, of our relationship.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the ketubbah, which is the contract of marriage. It is in three languages, in Hebrew, in French and in English. Mariane van Neyenhoff and Daniel Pearl entered into the following covenant. "We promise to grow old together while keeping each other young, maintaining our sense of humor, sharing love and secrets. We promise to discover new things, places and people together. We promise to share our happiness with our friends and relatives. We promise not to let money, lack of money or passage of time change us."
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There was one thing that we'd learned as "Wall Street Journal" reporters, and that was, Follow the money, always follow the money.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Next, 9/11 and the search for answers.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: In prison in India, Omar Sheikh is all but forgotten until the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight in December 1999. The hijackers demand that the Indian government release militant leader Masood Azhar, as well as his disciple, Omar Sheikh. They force the pilot to fly to Kandahar in Afghanistan. The hijackers demonstrate they mean business by cutting the throat of one of the passengers, a newly married man on honeymoon with his wife.
FIELDING: The Indians very rapidly gave in, and in fact, decided to fly Azhar and Omar Sheikh and the other prisoner directly to Kandahar on an Indian government aircraft. There appears to be direct collaboration between the Taliban forces on the ground and the people actually carrying out the hijacking on the aircraft. LEVY: Agents of ISI were in Kandahar on the airstrip when the plane was blocked (ph). They were negotiating with the terrorists, with the Indians who came with Omar Sheikh and two others to make the exchange. ISI were there.
FIELDING: The Pakistani authorities ensured that the hijackers were immediately released from Taliban custody and were enabled to make their escape. One of the first things they did was to meet with Osama bin Laden, who was certainly in Kandahar, in that region, at the time. He welcomed their freedom.
But shortly after that, certainly, the three prisoners make their way to Pakistan, and within a day or two, Masood Azhar gives an extremely important speech. Omar Sheikh was on the fringe of (INAUDIBLE) and taking it all in. And the real question was, How do you use a man like this? This is a planner, a thinker, somebody that they need at the heart of the organization. He begins to play more of a background (ph) role but a very important role within both al Qaeda and the sort of Taliban milieu.
AMANPOUR: At the end of 1999, "The Wall Street Journal" promotes Daniel Pearl to bureau chief in India. Daniel and Mariane move to Bombay.
STEIGER: Being Southeast Asia bureau chief, it's a plum assignment that goes, you know, only to our most talented and successful reporters.
AMANPOUR: Daniel Pearl is soon doing in India what he did on other assignments, exploring the local culture, interacting with people of different backgrounds, playing music.
JOE ALVAREZ, MUSICIAN: I first met Daniel Pearl when I was playing at Indigo one night. I said, If you have your instrument now, we're doing this blues tune. Right now, you can get in to play with us straightaway, rather than listen. And surprisingly, he pulled out his electric violin, connected it to the amplifier, and played beautifully without a single rehearsal.
MARIANE PEARL: Danny's assistant called him on the phone and said, Put CNN on, and we did. And we saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center, the second tower.
AMANPOUR: A day later, Daniel and Mariane fly to Pakistan, on the trail of al Qaeda.
MARIANE PEARL: It was a very strange experience to go get on a plane on the September 12. We did. The whole world is in shock, and really in shock, and everybody's in shock. And we don't know where the danger is coming from.
NOMANI: By that time, Pakistan had thousands of journalists. It had at least 2,000 journalists. They were all trying to get into Afghanistan. Danny had decided that he wasn't going to join that pack. He was trying to get into the network of terrorism. He was trying to figure out how al Qaeda was financed. AMANPOUR: He starts tracking sources right away and finds an ex- ISI man reputed to have met Osama bin Laden and who knows the jihadi groups intimately.
KHALID KHAWAJA, POLITICAL ANALYST, EX-PAKISTAN AIR FORCE: I got him an interview with the counselor of Taliban, so he did interview him in front of me. And I asked somebody to help him out. So I think most of his contracts which he got in Pakistan were through me.
AMANPOUR: Daniel begins exploring possible links between Pakistan and the financing of terrorist groups.
NOMANI: There was one thing that we'd learned as "Wall Street Journal" reporters, and that was, Follow the money, always follow the money. Somehow, somebody was financing the terrorists. Danny knew that that was critical story.
AMANPOUR: Omar Sheikh is also spending time in Pakistan. He is now a suspected al Qaeda operative who specializes in kidnapping.
Coming up, Daniel Pearl digs deeper into the dark world of terrorism.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: The Pakistan that Daniel Pearl and Omar Sheikh move in and out of is not an ordinary country. It's a nuclear power. Created as a state for Muslims after India was partitioned in 1947, following the largest cross-migration of peoples in our time, it has been ruled by the military for most of its history, with three competing power centers: the armed forces, long allied to the United States, the Pakistani ISI intelligence, which is almost a state within a state, and the street, where the mosques and the Islamic militants wield their power.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (SUBTITLES): If America dares to commit an act of aggression against an Islamic state, even the children of Pakistan will join the jihad!
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE WALKER BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I would strongly urge any nation in the world to reject terrorism, expel terrorists. I would strongly urge the Taliban to turn over the al Qaeda organizers who hide in their country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: To many in Pakistan, this sounds like a declaration of war against Islam.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BUSH: More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands. None of these demands were met, and now the Taliban will pay a price.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: When America declares war against Osama bin Laden and sends its troops to capture him and its bombers to wipe out al Qaeda, President Musharraf faces an acute dilemma, deciding to align himself with the United States.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, PAKISTANI PRESIDENT: My dear countrymen...
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Musharraf's authority is soon challenged by a dangerous coalition of Islamic extremists, including Omar Sheikh's mentor, Maulana Massood Azhar.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAULANA MASSOOD AZHAR (SUBTITLES): This is our country. No one can dictate to us. We will not listen to the U.N. Security Council, where no Muslim country is represented.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Islamic scholars that run the madrassas, the religious schools which are said to produce many of the militants, are outspoken in their condemnation of the U.S. and Israel.
NAULANA NIZAMUDDIN SHAMSZAI, HEAD OF BIN NURI MADRASSA, KARACHI (SUBTITLES): The truth is, the Jews are using the Americans to try to dominate the world. This is causing hatred against them in the Muslim world, especially among youth.
AMANPOUR: Former ISI chief General Hamid Gul argues that the Americans are trying to weaken Pakistan and the Muslim world.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GENERAL HAMID GUL, FORMER ISI CHIEF (SUBTITLES): Their main aim is to stop the jihad and force Pakistan to abandon its nuclear capabilities.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MARIANE PEARL: Pakistan being a nuclear state and Pakistan having very clear historical, if nothing else, ties with the Talibans and the al Qaeda movement, Pakistan or the nuclear scientists in Pakistan share nuclear devices with terrorists.
LEVY: A few days before his abduction (INAUDIBLE) It was an article about the risks of nuclear proliferation, dissemination from Pakistan towards rogue states and maybe al Qaeda.
AMANPOUR: "The Wall Street Journal" runs Daniel's story on page eight. Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist will later admit selling top secret technology on the black market to countries hostile to the United States.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Have you been debriefed?
DR. A.Q. KHAN, NUCLEAR SCIENTIST: No comment.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Daniel has been working on another important story. In a daring scoop, he reveals that General Musharraf's regime will not or cannot crack down on Islamic radicals openly preaching rebellion in Pakistan. He reports that one of the supposedly banned leaders who appeared in public with an anti-Western message of hate is the same militant who had been freed with Omar Sheikh by the hijackers, Maulana Masood Azhar, Omar Sheikh's mentor. In effect, he is saying that Musharraf is unable to maintain law and order in Pakistan.
MARIANE PEARL: There is no doubt that Danny was, you know, into a question -- was pursuing a question that would be big trouble for Pakistan. There is no doubt about that.
AMANPOUR: Foreign reporters are being carefully monitored by the government in Pakistan. But the militants, too, may be aware of Daniel Pearl's probing. He is possibly becoming a marked man.
Next, Omar Sheikh puts his plan in motion to kidnap Daniel Pearl.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Richard Reid, a British national, was detained by the security authorities in the United States this morning. Reid was overpowered by flight attendants and passengers as he tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes...
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Following up on the Reid story, Daniel Pearl begins looking for a religious leader called Sheikh Gillani.
MARIANE PEARL: It is possible that this man was Richard Reid's spiritual leader.
LEVY: This Mr. Gillani, the biggest number of his followers are not in Pakistan in general but are in America.
AMANPOUR: To reach Gillani, Pearl turns back to Khalid Khawaja, who is a known Gillani disciple. KHAWAJA: I said, He will not be available, sorry. He was just requesting to me again and again. I said, Look, Daniel, when I'm telling you something, just listen to it. He is not willing to come for an interview.
AMANPOUR: But Daniel Pearl is determined to get an interview with Sheikh Gillani, whom he suspects of running al Qaeda's hawala, a grass roots method for transferring money without bank records that may have helped fund the September 11 attacks.
KHAWAJA: He kept on calling me the whole day after every one hour. I said, Danny, don't call me. I'll call you whenever I'm free. I called him at about 9:00 o'clock. I said, OK, if you can come now to my office, you're welcome. He said, Can I come in one-and-a-half hour? I said, No, I will sleep then. So next day, he again called me in the morning. He said, Can I come? No, I said, Sorry, I'm busy now. This was the last call I received.
JOHN BUSSEY, DANIEL PEARL'S FOREIGN EDITOR, "WALL STREET JOURNAL": In the process of poking around and spreading the net for folks who might know Gillani, he spread the net pretty widely and went into the jihadi community to see if there was anyone there. A fellow named Bashir came to his attention.
AMANPOUR: It seemed like a breakthrough.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A meeting occurred in Rawalpindi, in a hotel. And Danny (INAUDIBLE) this person, you know, supposedly a disciple of Sheikh Gillani.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Bashir doesn't have a beard. He's wearing jeans. He's looking completely non-threatening. He's looking like the last thing from a jihadi that anyone would suspect.
AMANPOUR: Although a cautious reporter, Daniel Pearl has no inkling that Bashir is actually Omar Sheikh.
BUSSEY: Bashir was the alias that Omar Sheikh was using. He had come to this interview because he knew -- he had heard that there was an American reporter asking questions about Gillani, and he was looking in the back of his mind for a way to embarrass Musharraf. Musharraf was cracking down on the jihadi groups, many of which Omar Sheikh had relations with. An American had dropped into his lap. And so he began to think during the session with Danny in the hotel in Rawalpindi that perhaps a kidnapping would serve his purpose.
AMANPOUR: But Bashir doesn't rush things. For 11 days, he and Daniel exchange increasingly friendly e-mails.
BUSSEY: All this time, Omar Sheikh is spinning out this confidence game and beginning to set in motion the various teams of people that he'll need to kidnap this American. Toward the end of the e-mail string, about the 11th -- 10th or 11th day, Omar Sheikh says, I have some good news for you. I've been able to set up this interview for you in Karachi. Gillani will see you. I'll send a car. We'll make all the arrangements. AMANPOUR: The journalist and the jihadi have crossed paths, and a trap is being set for Daniel Pearl.
MARIANE PEARL: We have been there for a month, and I was pregnant. So you know, about January 21, we had -- went to (INAUDIBLE) sonogram in Islamabad, and we found out we had a baby boy.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He called us -- everybody, each sister separately -- to tell us that they found out it's a boy.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
ANSWERING MACHINE: Sunday, January 20, at 10:10 PM.
DANIEL PEARL: (INAUDIBLE) I wanted you to be the first one to find out if it's a boy or a girl. But I don't want your answering machine to be the first one to find out. I mean, we just went for the check-up. So anyhow, you have to give me a call. It's 92...
(END AUDIO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Next, fearing the worst.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The number you have dialed is not responding at the moment.
MARIANE PEARL: And when I realized after two hours that his phone was still answering machine, I knew something was wrong.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: An American journalist, a Muslim terrorist, with similar backgrounds, but conflicting ideas. Two remarkable journeys that put them on a collision course towards kidnap and murder.
So Mariane and Daniel decide to leave Pakistan after stopping over for a few days in the southern city of Karachi. Here, the Pearls stay with Daniel's friend and journal colleague from his Washington days, Asra Nomani.
ASRA NOMANI, We had found that the e-mail address to which Richard Reed has sent and e-mail was an e-mail address that was Cyber Net, and Cyber Net is an Internet service provider in Karachi.
MARIANE PEARL, WIFE OF DAVID PEARL: We were tired and cranky and frustrated in terms of work. So Danny that he wanted to do something significant before he left.
AMANPOUR: This evening, Daniel is finally to meet Gilani.
PEARL: I didn't go with him to that interview because I just didn't feel like it. I was pregnant and I was feeling not well. And I said, O.K., I'm not going. I'm just tired of it. I'm staying home and wait for you.
NOMANI: I'll never forget the last time I saw him because it was at the beautiful time in Karachi When the sun has reached its Peak. It is the late afternoon.
AMANPOUR: Before going to the restaurant, Daniel seeks out a security briefing at the U.S. consulate.
RANDALL BENNETT, CHIEF OF REGIONAL SECURITY, U.S. CONSULATE KARACHI: Danny showed up in my office at 3:30 p.m. I got a very strong sense that he was also a cautious individual. That he was not somebody to go take risks.
During the conversation, he mentioned to me that he had an appointment that night. And that it was with a leader of a -- a fundamentalist group that I was unfamiliar with.
Sheikh Gilani was the name of the individual and the name of the group was al Fukra. So I was concerned. But he said to me he was meeting at the village restaurant.
My advice to him had been if you are going to meet this individual, not knowing the background of the individual or the organization, it should be at a public location. And the village restaurant was a public location, on a busy street. And it seemed like the perfect place to meet.
He said, well, he's the leader of a muthrasu (ph), which is a religious school. And he might want to take me to his school to show it to me.
And my recommendation was that he keep to a public place and that he not go to the muthrasu (ph) if that was what Sheikh Gilani had requested.
Even the police don't like to go into them. And there wasn't an al Qaeda or a Taliban influence in some of those areas where the Madari's (ph) were located.
AMANPOUR: Daniel wants another opinion. He goes to the Karachi Police Citizen Liaison Committee, which specializes in negotiating ransoms in kidnapping cases.
JAMIL YUSUF, FORMER HEAD, CITIZEN-POLICE LIAISON COMMITTEE KARACHI: When he came there, you know, he asked if I knew Gilani. And actually, Gilani was not known a figure in Pakistan at all. And somehow the interview from Karachi, which seemed rather improbable, the person staying in Lahore (ph) giving an interview in Karachi. It didn't make sense.
But while sitting with me, he got two telephone calls. And that's exactly how I came to know that he was going for an appointment after me. You see?
When he talked to them, yes, I'm very close to you. I'll be meeting you at 7: 00. And then, another confirmation came at about, say, five to 7:00 or ten to 7:00, you see. And he told them he's coming.
Now, he went from here. That was the end of the story.
PEARL: But we had this habit of calling each other every 90 minutes if we were not together. I started calling him and, you know, there was the answering machine on. But, yes. And then -- but pretty quickly I started getting worried.
RECORDING: The number you have dialed is not responding at the moment. Please try later.
PEARL: When I realized after two hours that his phone was still answering machine, I knew something was wrong because I knew that Danny would have called me. I also knew -- and that's just instinct -- but I also knew that it had to do with terrorism.
AMANPOUR: For six hours, Mariane is unable to reach Daniel.
RUTH PEARL, DANIEL'S MOTHER: I had a dream the night that Daniel was kidnapped. And the dream was that he was in some kind of a trouble situation. He felt like he is going to die. It was a nightmare that I never experienced before.
It was the first time that I had such a forbidding nightmare about Danny. I ran to the computer and I sent him an e-mail asking him, describing the situation, and wrote saying this is terrorist. And I ask him to answer the e-mail.
The dream was very likely at the moment that he realized that he was kidnapped. It was 7:20 in the morning in Los Angeles. And it was 8:20 in the evening in Karachi. Of course, he never got that e-mail.
NOMANI: He had left the computer on. And he didn't have any password. And so, we immediately went into Outlook. Because Outlook was where he had all of his e-mails. And then we started seeing, you know, these e-mails from Bashir.
He was using a Yahoo address also of Nobadmashee, which, you know, I knew immediately was just trickery. Nobadmashee is somebody who is a troublemaker. If Danny watched another Bollywood movies, he would have figured that out. But Nobadmashee then is somebody who is not into troublemaking.
PEARL: We had no idea who to call and who's trustworthy not -- we had no idea at all.
AMANPOUR: Increasingly worried, Asra contacted Khalid Khawaja because he knows Gilani.
NOMANI: He had a sense and knowledge about Gilani that made me feel even more confident that he would comply with my next request, which was call Gilani, please, you know, find him for us. Find him and tell us if he was supposed to meet with Danny. And if he wasn't, we need to know that.
KHALID KHAWAJA, POLITICAL ANALYST, EX-PAKISTAN AIR FORCE: I said, Sheikh Gilani, since the time I know him, he has never, ever visited Karachi. She became a little arrogant. And she said, but does something about it. I said, look, Asra, thousands of my brothers and sisters have been kidnapped by your government, and killed, and kidnapped. And I have so many families to look after where -- who have nobody to look after. This man will be looked after by many. So I don't have to bother about it so much.
NOMANI: We'd hear cars going by. We'd hear cars stopping. And -- and we thought that maybe it was Danny. I was still so hopeful.
PEARL: So what we did was to call the consulate. But at 1:00 in the morning, they didn't take us seriously.
NOMANI: And Corporal Bailey said, well, ladies, you know, it's interesting. And call back in the morning, you know? Call back at 6:00 a.m. when the regional security officer, Randall Bennett, comes in.
We kept waiting until dawn then. I knew when Fuger (ph) prayers started, you know, the morning prayer, the Assan (ph) breaks through the Karachi air and we were waiting for that moment.
SYED KAMAL SHAH, INSPECTOR GENERAL OF POLICE: We feel he is alive. We feel he is alive.
AMANPOUR: When we come back, the search for Daniel Pearl.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BENNETT: About 10:00, I went over to the house that Danny had been staying at with his wife Mariane.
PEARL: He said, okay, call these people. Give us names, precise names, either Pakistani police enforcement, people they trusted. And, you know, he took the situation seriously right away.
BENNETT: We began to look into his notes, his computer data. Anything we could find that might give us a lead towards phone numbers of individuals, places that he might go. Names and phone numbers, contacts principally.
Karachi is the ninth largest city in the world. It's got 14 million people. And probably 95 percent of the city has the potential for disruption. And it's problematic.
We needed the Pakistani police involved. So, we were assigned an intelligence officer and an inspector, a police inspector. And that police inspector headed up an assault team. And we became the working group for the first four or five days.
And following that, FBI agents were also assigned.
KATHY DISKIN, SPECIAL AGENT, FBI: My total focus at the time was to find Danny Pearl. And find the individuals who were behind it. We were there to tell the Pakistani authorities that we were here to help them in any way possible. JOHN BUSSEY, PEARL'S FOREIGN EDITOR, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: We called the State Department, our Washington Bureau called the State Department to begin the process to energize the bureaucracy in Islamabad to begin the search for Danny.
COLIN POWELL, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: I have spoken to President Musharraf in Pakistan about the situation. And I know that he is doing everything he can.
BUSSEY: The bureaucracy within Pakistan was going to have to play a major role. And I wasn't sure whether I was going to have to shake that tree much harder than we were shaking it.
SHAH: We are. We are working very vigorously. And we hope to arrest those people.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Is he alive?
SHAH: We feel he is alive. We feel he is alive.
BENNETT: As the first day and the second day and the third day went by, obviously, people begin to -- they begin to have thoughts that are less than optimistic.
I refused to believe that we weren't going to get him back.
R. PEARL: We just couldn't believe that there was no trace of him. And then, the pictures came. We were together and the computer too slow to come down. You can imagine eternity until we could see the picture. And then, we identified him right away. And we started crying and laughing because we knew he might be alive.
AMANPOUR: The pictures of Daniel Pearl with a gun to his head are first sent to the "Los Angeles Times." They're then e-mailed to Mariane and the investigators in Karachi.
PEARL: I saw the picture of Danny with a gun to his head and smile on his face, which, for me, was exactly how I felt. It's just amazing because -- I remember, like, laughing and crying at the same time.
BENNETT: Danny was sitting there in a sweat suit and a man -- all that was visible was his arm. But it had a pistol pointed at Danny's head. So we started working with that. And we started breaking down the picture, trying to identify various components of it.
UNIDENTIFIED NEWS ANCHOR: The Islamic group in Pakistan, holding the American reporter Daniel Pearl, gave the United States another day today to meet the demands before they say they'll kill him. They said his abduction was just the beginning. They're demanding the release of prisoners from the war in Afghanistan.
POWELL: The demands that the kidnappers have placed are not demands that we can meet or deal with, or get into a negotiation about. AMANPOUR: At first, the kidnappers make political demands. But then, in a subsequent message, become more rhetorical and threatening.
UNIDENTIFIED KIDNAPPER: We are inside seas, oceans, hills, everywhere. We give you one more day. If America will not meet our demands, we will kill Daniel.
AMANPOUR: Many of these ransom demands turn out to be fakes, making it harder to trace the e-mails from the real kidnappers.
PEARL: His, almost religion, I would say, is truth. Is somebody is like who -- I never saw him say a lie. You know? I have never seen somebody so honest about, you know, the people and never has any judgment. You know? And the reason, like -- we're in Pakistan today, is because we wanted to know more about the people.
DISKIN: I was there also with two FBI agents who had computer -- who were computer technicians. Luck, it was purely luck that they were there at the same time I was.
With their help, we were able to find out the IP address and try to find out where this e-mail originated from.
We had the access to the Internet provider's hotmail, Yahoo, here in the United States. But priority number one that we did in the beginning was to track down Sheikh Gilani in order to interview him.
AMANPOUR: Police find him. He's brought in for questioning.
DISKIN: I had the opportunity to sit down and interview with Sheikh Gilani. And when 15 minutes went into the interview, our feelings were that Sheikh Gilani was not involved in this.
AMANPOUR: It becomes clear that Daniel's alleged meeting with Sheikh Gilani was a set up.
PEARL: The next day, the picture of Danny in the newspapers. And there was an article about Danny being Jewish.
DISKIN: The damage was done already regarding coming out -- that report regarding Danny being Jewish. And it was reflected in, I believe, the second e-mail that we got from -- we believe, from the original kidnappers.
In the first e-mail, they mentioned that Danny was a CIA agent. And that was the first one.
In the second e-mail, they were calling him the Massad agent.
BENNETT: When we began the raids that night, we knew that we had to complete the entire circuit by the first prayer of the day, which was about 5:30 in the morning.
Coming up, it's a race against time.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) AMANPOUR: Asra and Mariane start tracing the mysterious Bashir, unaware that he is Omar Sheikh. They track down the fixer who had introduced Daniel to Bashir.
NOMANI: Mariane had asked for (inaudible) number. I called him. And we talked to him. And he said that Danny asked him to find Gilani. So he called a colleague that he knew at "Jung." And this colleague was covering Jihadi organizations, just like a "Wall Street Journal" reporter in the Atlantic bureau could cover Coca-Cola.
AMANPOUR: The reporter at "Jung" newspaper had unwittingly put Daniel in touch with terrorists who were Omar Sheikh's colleagues.
A circle of association is slowly coming into focus. A terrorist network is emerging.
BENNETT: As we began to structure the network, we saw cell phones that were used under the name of Bashir. And then that same number was being utilized under the name of somebody else. And people were calling other people and that the relationships started to take shape.
AMANPOUR: The FBI and the Pakistani police start making progress.
DISKIN: We got our next lead our or best lead when we were able to identify. Primarily, the Pakistani authorities were able to identify a land line that they felt one of the e-mails was hooked up to.
BENNETT: One of the e-mails had an IP address on it that we traced back to a particular server location, an Internet cafe. And we identified one particular server within that cafe.
DISKIN: They identified an apartment building, which had approximately 80 units. And in one of those units, they were fairly confident that a computer in one of these apartments was where one of the e-mails was sent out from.
BENNETT: So in truth, what we have to do was monitor that server and wait until the next e-mail came. And identify that it matched up with the same user number as the others.
And within, I think, it was 24 hours, the next message came. And it tracked back to a specific apartment in that building.
And the first move was, we raided that apartment building and captured a young man and confiscated his computer equipment. But he had, he thought, cleansed or he had purged his hard drive.
DISKIN: The FBI computer technicians were able to locate, fairly quickly, on his laptop photographs that were used on the first original e-mail.
BENNETT: And through their technological magic, they reconstructed the parts that remained. And one of the things that came out was one of the photos of the man with the gun pointed to Danny's head. So we knew we had the first solid lead.
That interrogation led to another one, and led to another capture, and led to another capture.
We grabbed number two and we're racing down the alley to get back out again as quickly as we can. Individuals had -- well, they were still awake. They saw what was happening. And there was some gun fire. There were some cars lit on fire at the end of the alley to try and block our path. But we were moving pretty quickly. And the plan was pretty well structured in advance.
When we began the raids that night, we knew that we had to complete the entire circuit by the first prayer of the day, which was about 5:30 in the morning. Because once the people went to the mosques, the word would be out that our investigation was getting close to the people, and that we had picked up some individuals.
And we knew that those that we had not detained up to the point that the sun came up, would go under ground.
We captured the principle four people that had been responsible for the planning of the kidnapping and the e-mails.
AMANPOUR: Randall and the investigating team are about to discover that Bashir and Omar sheikh are one and the same person.
BENNETT: Then, through the individuals that we now had in captivity, we learned that Bashir was actually Sheikh Omar.
AMANPOUR: Omar Sheikh, alias Bashir, or Sheikh Omar, as Randall calls him, now holds the key to finding Daniel alive.
DISKIN: We were able to identify Omar Sheikh as the individual who authorized the kidnapping.
NOMANI: I put his name into Google. And I -- you know, Marianne was sitting next to me them. And I was like, look at this. And it was so awful, that moment then.
PEARL: That night -- they'd already kidnapped foreigners in India, the men who had been exchanging e-mails with Danny. And they had met Danny (inaudible) was Omar Sheikh.
NOMANI: And then we got this picture. And it was a picture on the A.P. of Omar Sheikh. The police had done a drawing of Omar from the descriptions. And we put it up on our chart, like, right next to each other. And they looked identical.
AMANPOUR: A hunt is now on for Omar Sheikh.
Meanwhile, President Musharraf has arrived in Washington where he claims Daniel is still alive. He appears confident.
NOMANI: Captain, as he told us then that next morning, picks up the phone and tells Omar, "I know who you are. I know what you have done." AMANPOUR: When we return, the kidnapper is caught.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: One of the men picked up, in the police raids, turns out to be a cousin of Omar Sheikh. His mobile phone has Omar's number.
ASRA NOMANI, DANIEL PEARL'S FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE: Captain, as he told us then that next morning, picks up the phone and tells Omar -- because now he knows that it's Omar Sheikh from his cousin -- tells him, "I know who you are. I know what you've done."
Omar is startled and then hangs up the phone. Then, Feb. 12, we got this amazing, you know, visit from Captain, that Omar Sheikh had been found.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sheikh Omar turned himself in to authorities in Lahore (ph).
NOMANI: And he's being brought to Karachi.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SHEIKH OMAR (through translator): America is going to be destroyed! Sell your dollars.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't talk like that.
(CROSSTALK)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
NOMANI: Mariane started daydreaming about where she would take Danny to recover. The White House called offering, you know, this C- 130, and they were going to take him to a military base in Germany for recuperation.
The truth came out that, in fact, he had been picked up on Feb. 5 -- that as soon as the police had contacted him and started picking up his family, he had gone to men that he trusted would protect him.
AMANPOUR: Incredibly, for a whole week, Omar Sheikh has been in the custody of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, unknown to the Pakistani police, which had publicly mounted a huge manhunt for him.
MARIANE PEARL, WIFE OF DANIEL PEARL: He was, like, the main ISI person at the time and became a governor of the Punjab province, and he handed himself over to him, his ex-ISI contact.
NOMANI: And he was a former ISI official. Brigadier Ijaz Shah was his name.
MARIANE PEARL: And at the time that he was under police control, it was a whole week, and no one knew what happened. President Musharraf was in the United States, and the ISI was keeping this guy and doing what they had to do to protect him, protect his sources.
This tells you how powerful these people are, because who would dare, you know, when the two heads of state are together in the same country, keep the main suspect in the kidnapping of an American journalist, with the worldwide media attention? Who would do that?
NICK FELDING, SENIOR REPORTER, "THE SUNDAY TIMES," LONDON: I think the kidnapping was enormously embarrassing and I think it was a huge blow. Potentially, it had the power to topple Musharraf himself.
AMANPOUR: The modus operandi of the terrorists begins to emerge.
RANDALL BENNETT, CHIEF OF REGIONAL SECURITY, U.S. CONSULATE, KARACHI: When we first questioned Sheikh Omar about where Danny was, he said he had no idea, and he stuck to that throughout because he compartmentalized his operation.
KATHY DISKIN, SPECIAL AGENT, FBI: Omar Sheikh did that purposely. Not everyone knew everybody, so if you caught one of them, the other ones wouldn't give everybody else up.
BENNETT: There was the group which he had hired, which carried out the actual e-mail. There was another group that carried out the physical kidnapping operation, and then there was another group that held Danny at a location that some of the other segmented groups did not know.
DISKIN: He's done this before. He is an intelligent man. I mean, he's very well-educated and a smart man, but a psycho.
NOMANI: First, Omar said Danny was alive, and then he said he was dead, and then he said he was alive.
BENNETT: He actually admitted liability for it. He claimed responsibility as if it had been a successful operation on his part. His justification was simply that it was a Jihad against the infidels, against the Americans, and that he wanted to make a point.
DISKIN: Basically, he said, "I was the one who was thought of it. I was the one behind it." But he was not the one who basically had -- physically had Danny.
NOMANI: Slowly, Omar Sheikh revealed this idea that Danny was dead because he had called the kidnappers, and they had code language that "the patient had died on the operating table," and that he was dead.
BENNETT: None of us wanted to believe that Danny was dead. At the end of the fifth week, we received a phone call from an individual who said he had a videotape of the death of Danny Pearl.
We arranged to meet him in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. We set our people up at tables in the cafe and around so that if this individual came in, we would be able to control the situation.
He did show up. He delivered a package. We opened the package, but it wasn't a videotape. It was actually a camera, and inside the camera was a small tape. Since it was a camera and the tape inside the camera, we weren't able to use the hook-ups.
So we all moved from there to my home -- actually, to my residence, which was about half a mile away. We all went into my living room and carefully hooked up the camera up to my -- through my VCR and into the TV, and we played the tape. And at that moment, it was obvious to us that that was Danny and that he was dead.
AMANPOUR: The tape is horrific. Daniel Pearl has been beheaded. The kidnappers film the event for a wider circulation later on video and DVD.
MARIANE PEARL: I knew exactly what they had just done -- you know, symbolically killed someone, taped that so that they could commit an act of terror. It was as clinically an act of terrorism than 9/11 attacks.
JUDEA PEARL, DANIEL PEARL'S FATHER: My first question on the phone to the consul, American consul in Karachi, "Are you sure that he is dead?"
He said, "Yes."
"How can you be sure?" He said, "I can tell you that he is sure. Don't ask how."
And I said, "You mean they cut his head?"
He said, "Yes."
TAMARA PEARL, SISTER OF DANIEL PEARL: I just wanted to know that he wasn't in pain, you know? That he -- or was as -- that it all happened very quickly.
NOMANI: I started saying, you know, this Muslim prayer that my mother's taught me since I was a kid for protection for Danny.
Then the first rains came that I had ever even myself experienced in Karachi. It was like showers -- could start hearing coming down -- and I started weeping, you know? With those rains, like, I -- you know, felt like the heavens had opened, and angels were crying and that Danny was there.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: Two months later, Al Qaeda operatives bomb the Sheraton Hotel and the U.S. Consulate in Karachi. Fourteen people, including 11 French naval officers, are killed. Over 400 members of extremist groups are picked up and questioned. One man says he knows where the American journalist Daniel Pearl is buried.
AIJAZ HASHMI, DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT OF POLICE: This is the place. The body would be here, of Daniel Pearl. (UNINTELLIGIBLE) This is the place. BENNETT: Apparently Danny was only held for the first week. He was killed following approximately seven days of captivity. He was kept on this small compound, which had some olive trees and some other fruit trees and some grapevines, and there were a couple of small cinderblock rooms where Danny was kept and the actual photos for the e-mail were taken.
During that period of time, Danny had apparently made two attempts to escape, both times failing to escape.
But in interrogating the -- one of the Pakistanis who had actually held Danny at the compound -- and he was the one who relayed the final events, the final moments of Danny's life -- he said that all throughout that week, their understanding was that at the end of this propaganda, Danny was going to be released.
AMANPOUR: The empty house belongs to one Saud Memon, don of the Karachi underworld and a fundraiser for Al Qaeda. Memon brokered a deal with an Arab terrorist group which wanted to buy Daniel Pearl from the Pakistanis for $50,000.
The kidnappers accepted the deal and handed Daniel over to the Arab group. Three men arrived the next day with a video camera, butcher's knives and $9,000. The balance was to be collected later.
Reports reveal that Daniel told his captors that his wife was expecting, and he sang songs for her and recited her Buddhist chants. His new captors were determined to use Daniel for their terrorist propaganda.
He made a statement for the camera:
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
DANIEL PEARL: My name is Daniel Pearl. I'm a Jewish-American. I come from a - on my father's side, a family of Zionists. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I'm Jewish.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: Then Daniel further asserted his Jewish identity and his family's ties to Israel.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
DANIEL PEARL: In that town of Nehrab (ph) in Israel, there's a street called Heim Pearl Street, which is named after my great- grandfather, who was one of the founders of it.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: After refusing to be forcibly sedated, Daniel Pearl was held down by four men and slaughtered. The executioners left, leaving the Pakistani gang to dispose of Daniel's body, which was cut into 10 pieces and buried in the compound in plastic bags.
In June 2002, Omar Sheikh and his three accomplices are put on trial.
HASHMI (through translator): Once when we were bringing him back from court, one of the journalists present asked him, "Do you think you have done the right thing?"
He replied, "What I had to do was absolutely right."
In my opinion, he had gone beyond the category of brainwashed person. He had himself become an institution who could manipulate others.
AMANPOUR: Omar Sheikh is found guilty and sentenced to hang. His three accomplices receive 25 years each.
Omar Sheikh has appealed against the death sentence, but inexplicably, his appeal has been delayed 33 times. Since the trial, several arrests have been made, including that of the mastermind of 9/11, and the alleged No. 3 in the Al Qaeda network, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in American custody.
Sources in the American administration, Pakistani police and two of the kidnappers in custody claim that it was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who actually slaughtered Daniel Pearl.
BERNARD-HENRI LEVY, AUTHOR, "WHO KILLED DANIEL PEARL?": It had something to do with what Daniel Pearl knew -- what they did not know he knew, and which they discovered he knew, and which they decided he could not go out knowing it.
Was it about Jihadi? Was it about the nuclear question? Was it about the ISI-Al Qaeda relationship? The three are possible.
JUDEA PEARL: My explanation is that they tried to make a point -- tried to humiliate the U.S. One mistake they made is they bought a camera. That camera associated whatever Danny stood for with America and with Jewish-ness. It was important for them to convey the message that the U.S. would in some way be punished. And I believe that that was their message, and that was the reason why he was killed.
NAULANA NIZAMUDDIN SHAMSZAI, HEAD OF BIN NURI MADRASSA, KARACHI (through translator): The truth is no Islamic scholar has called Daniel's murder an act of Jihad.
Can the West name even one scholar who has approved of Daniel's murder?
JUDEA PEARL: I won't take revenge against the hatred that took his life. I don't direct it against people. I direct it against the hate, and I direct it against the ideology that allowed this hate to ferment to such magnitude.
AMANPOUR: When we come back, the legacy of Daniel Pearl.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
AMANPOUR: After Daniel's death, there was a public display of remorse. Mariane receives hundreds of letters of condolence around the world, and some of the most moving are from Muslims in Pakistan.
MARIANE PEARL: "As a Pakistani, I am ashamed of being one today. His unborn son will come into this world hating us. I have no words to say how sorry I am for what happened to Danny. My heart goes out for your family, and now console myself knowing he is happier there with his Creator and looking down and smiling and longing to see his beautiful unborn son."
AMANPOUR: Mariane Pearl and her boy, Adam, the son that Daniel named and who was born four and a half months after his murder, are living in New York.
MARIANE PEARL: I don't (UNINTELLIGIBLE), I don't have a husband -- but Omar Sheikh -- he has a wife, he has a son. He is in exactly the same position. Omar Sheikh -- what a mess he created.
AMANPOUR: Mariane has written a book and returned to her work as a journalist.
PEARL: I see happiness as a mecca of resistance, and my resistance to bitterness is my resistance to terrorism, and, you know, bitterness will kill me.
AMANPOUR: Ruth and Judea Pearl and their daughters, Tamara and Michelle, have set up the Daniel Pearl Foundation for the promotion of interfaith understanding through music and journalism.
JUDEA PEARL: We have messages from thousands of people who were affected emotionally by the tragedy, and this is what gives us the hope that he is this undercurrent of decency in the world.
AMANPOUR: In England, the press brands Omar Sheikh "the British Jackal." His promise as a scholar and a sportsman have gone unrealized.
And Daniel Pearl?
NOMANI: You know, he wasn't trying to just get, you know, Pakistan's dirty secrets out. Danny was trying to basically stop the type of hatred and financing of acts of hatred that killed him.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I lost a great friend who always made me laugh. I really miss him. I really miss him.
RUTH PEARL, DANIEL PEARL'S MOTHER: Danny is buried on (UNINTELLIGIBLE) on Sinai. As a kid, he used to play with orchestras, and one of the orchestras played up there at the chapel there. They had a big chapel where he is buried, and Danny wrote in his diary when he was 10 years old, "Mount Sinai is the most beautiful place in the world."
And where he is buried, he can see the chapel where he played as a 10-year-old in the orchestra. It's kind of comforting to know that he admired the place where he is buried.
AMANPOUR: Daniel Pearl gave his life for his beliefs, as a humanist and a journalist who was committed to the quest for truth and understanding in a divided world.
MARIANE PEARL: I'm really happy that we really loved each other a lot. I know that Danny and I both knew real love, which is not something that everybody experiences, and as short as it was, it was absolutely strong and genuine and powerful.
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