U.S. Reporter Seen as Victim of Sophisticated Trap

Title: U.S. Reporter Seen as Victim of Sophisticated Trap
Author: Kamran Khan and Molly Moore
Publication: Washington Post
Date: Jan 30,2002
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58248-2002Jan29.html

Pakistani Police Describe Kidnapping Plot With Many False Fronts; Editor Appeals for Release

KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan. 29 -- Kidnappers who abducted an American correspondent here six days ago led him into a trap using false identities, cell phones bought under false names and e-mails sent from hard-to-trace Internet cafe connections, Pakistani law enforcement officials said today.

After two weeks of e-mails, telephone calls and a clandestine hotel meeting with a man claiming to be an intermediary, Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal took a taxi to a downtown Karachi restaurant early last Wednesday evening believing he was going to meet the leader of a fundamentalist Islamic organization based in Pakistan. Instead, the interview offer turned out to be a hoax by abductors who then used the e-mail identity "kidnapperguy" to notify several news organizations that Pearl had been kidnapped.

"Only a well-trained intelligence organization or an equally professional terrorist group could [carry out] such a well-planned kidnapping," a senior Karachi police investigator said.

Tonight, the Journal's managing editor, Paul Steiger, sent an e-mail to the kidnappers, saying he was prepared to work with them to obtain Pearl's release. In the e-mail, which was sent to the address used by "kidnapperguy" and released by the Journal's owner, Dow Jones & Co., Steiger also said that Pearl "has never worked for the CIA or the U.S. Government in any capacity." He referred repeatedly to Pearl's wife, Mariane Pearl, a French freelance journalist who is six months pregnant and has been living with her husband in Karachi.

"You should know that Danny has a wife," Steiger wrote, adding: "I would like you to know that she is greatly distressed over Danny's situation. She hopes that you will come to understand that keeping Danny will not alter U.S. Government policy or accomplish your goals."

The editor said Pearl "has no ability to change the policies of the U.S. Government or the Government of Pakistan. Nor do I. Therefore, I would ask that you release Danny so that he may return home safe to his wife and soon-to-be-born child."

The kidnapping took place the day after a Pakistani reporter for Time magazine was detained in Karachi, and held for more than 30 hours, by people whose identities have not been revealed. Time representatives have declined to discuss the details of reporter Ghulam Hasnain's detention.

Both reporters had been investigating and writing about Pakistan's militant Islamic organizations at a time when the government has been under intense international pressure to curb the activities of groups with ties to the al Qaeda network and separatists fighting a guerrilla war in the disputed border region of Kashmir. But it is unclear whether the two incidents involving the reporters are related.

The influx of hundreds of reporters over the past four months has made journalists the targets of anti-foreign rhetoric at urban demonstrations here, and some have been injured in scuffles with militant rural residents. But Pearl is the first foreign reporter to be abducted.

His kidnappers, in an e-mail with four photographs of the journalist -- including one with chains around his wrists and a gun pointed at his head -- demanded that Pakistani prisoners under U.S. detention in Cuba be released, that all Pakistani citizens under arrest in the United States in connection with terrorism investigations be allowed access to lawyers and family members, and that Pakistan receive the warplanes it had purchased from the United States but that were never delivered because of congressional sanctions.

Pakistani law enforcement authorities said they had no information about the organization claiming to have committed the abduction, the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, and believe it is a front name for the kidnappers.

Pearl, 38, a South Asia correspondent for the Journal, had been probing ties between Pakistani Islamic groups and Richard C. Reid, who has been charged with trying to blow up an American airliner en route to Miami from Paris last month, according to police. Pearl also was attempting to trace e-mails sent to Reid from Internet cafes in Karachi, investigators said.

Karachi police said a primary focus of the investigation is a man who called himself Bashir and claimed to be a representative of Harkat ul-Mujaheddin, one of the most radical Islamic groups in Pakistan and one of the organizations listed by the United States as a terrorist group in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. Police said they believe Bashir is a pseudonym.

Pearl met the supposed intermediary through two Pakistani journalists. Foreign reporters in Pakistan routinely hire bilingual local journalists familiar with specific issues or cities as "fixers" to help them set up interviews and make appointments. Police said they have interviewed both journalists and believe they were not involved in the kidnapping, but instead were also tricked by Bashir.

Two weeks ago Pearl met Bashir at a hotel room in Rawalpindi, a city near the capital, Islamabad. The two Pakistani journalists and a third man named Arif, who is believed to be an associate of Bashir, were at the meeting. Bashir told Pearl that he could arrange an interview with Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani, head of an obscure radical group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which was once on a U.S. terrorist-watch list but was dropped in 1997. Pearl was investigating possible links between Reid and Gilani, police said.

After raiding offices of Gilani's organization in Lahore and a retreat in the mountains of North-West Frontier Province and detaining Gilani's son, police said they now believe that neither Gilani nor his group was involved in the kidnapping. Police said, however, that they have not located Gilani.

For two weeks after the hotel meeting, Pearl and Bashir remained in frequent touch by telephone and e-mail, with Bashir using the e-mail address "nobadmashi," roughly translated in Urdu as "not a crook." Finally, Bashir recommended that Pearl make an appointment to meet a key lieutenant of the Harkat organization who called himself Amir Siddiqi -- a name police have since determined was concocted -- at 7 p.m. last Wednesday at the Village Garden Restaurant in downtown Karachi. Pearl's contacts said he would be taken to the interview from the restaurant.

Police investigators said witnesses interviewed at the restaurant said Pearl was met by at least two bearded men. But police said they lost Pearl's trail at the restaurant after he called his wife on his cell phone to say he would be home for dinner later in the evening.

Investigators said they have traced the cell phone that kidnappers used to call Pearl 30 minutes before the restaurant rendezvous to confirm the meeting. In what police consider another scheme by kidnappers, the telephone -- bought under a made-up name and address -- was used to make two calls to New Delhi after Pearl's abduction.

Police said they believe those calls were made in an effort to make it appear that Indian intelligence was involved in the kidnapping. Pearl was based in Bombay, but moved to Karachi temporarily because of Pakistan's involvement in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts since the Sept. 11 attacks.