Who Killed Daniel Pearl (34 page)

Am I going to bring up my questions now? Do I dare? I have a feeling I've almost said too much, that the interview is drawing to a close. So I plunge in.

“Is that why they killed the American journalist Daniel Pearl? Because he was a Jew? Do you have an opinion about this affair, which has attracted a lot of attention in my country?”

Just mentioning the name Pearl sets off a very strange reaction. First he curls up, pulling his head down between his shoulders, clenching his fists and drawing in his elbows as though he were about to face an agressor and wanted to reduce the target area. Then he straightens up, unfolding his big body, nearly rising, and extends his arms in my direction—the gesture of a preacher or of someone preparing to strike. It's funny, I think, seeing him suddenly so tall, towering over me—the Pakistani activists seem enormous, full of themselves, self-satisfied, nothing like the rawboned desperate killers I'd seen in Afghanistan.

“We have no opinion!” he finally utters in an oddly solemn voice. “We do not think anything about the death of this journalist! Islam is a religion of peace. The Pakistanis are a people of peace.”

And with that, he signals to the old imam, who has been standing in a corner of the room during the entire interview without my noticing him. It's time to take me back.

On the way back I see a large trap door, half hidden by a bush, which I suppose leads to an underground passage.

I catch a glimpse of a room my guide identifies with pride as the
madrasa
's library: two sets of metal shelves going halfway up the wall, both half-empty.

I pass by an elaborately tiled prayer room, where two large portraits preside, no doubt of Allama Yusuf Binori and Maulana Mufti Mohammed, founders of the seminary.

In another room, I see a portrait of Juma Namangani, the former Red Army soldier who became the head of the “Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” then commander-in-chief of the Arab battalion of al-Qaida before he was killed in the American bombing of Kunduz in November 2001.

Portraits in a
madrasa
?

In a place where the representation of a human face should be considered profanation?

But that's not the least of the surprises this strange visit had in store for me.

As earlier, with regard to the portrait of bin Laden, I'm dying to ask how these images could be considered compatible with the prohibition of representation.

But I prefer to remain silent.

I have only one pressing need, to get out of this place and go back to the Shiite riots in the street, the wailing flood of bloody and hysterical faithful whose threats seem almost reassuring when you are emerging from the house of the Devil.

Later that day, I ask the same questions to other people, elsewhere in the city. For example, the station chief of a Western intelligence agency, who fills me in on some of the missing pieces.

It was here in Binori Town, early in 2000, that Masood Azhar and the Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, the mosque's reigning holy man whom I was unable to meet, announced the foundation of the Jaish e-Mohammed. Here, in the presence of—and with the blessing of—the country's most respected
ulémas
, the organization that would furnish the elite battalions of al-Qaida was baptised.

A month later, in March, a quarrel broke out between Azhar and Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the man who had, while Azhar was in an Indian prison, risen in the hierarchy of Harkat ul-Mujahideen and usurped control of the organisation. As Jaish is a splinter group of the Harkat, to whom should the offices, the fleet of 4x4s, the arms and the safe-houses belong? The deep conflict inflamed the Islamist movement of Karachi. Once again, it was at Binori Town, under the authority of the same Nizamuddin Shamzai, that the appointed scholars gathered to arbitrate the question and to arrive at a
harkam
. They decided the Harkat should retain everything and pay financial compensation to the Jaish. Binori as a tribunal! Binori as the arbitration court for the internal conflicts of the al-Qaida conglomerate!

In October, when the Americans launched their political and military offensive, word circulated around Karachi of a possible inclusion of the Jaish on the American's list of terrorist groups. Once again, Nizamuddin Shamzai rose to the defense of the organization—from his base at Binori, he organized a new group, the Tehrik al-Furqan, of which he immediately assumed leadership, to replace the threatened group, taking over its financial assets, its bank accounts, its files and its activities. Binori—the linchpin of politico-financial trafficking . . . the spiritual head of one of the world's largest seminaries transformed into a front for an association of assassins.

After the fall of Kabul in November, bin Laden's defeated troops fled Afghanistan, and the survivors of Pakistani paramilitary groups tried to escape the crossfire of the Northern Alliance and the American bombers. Some of them (members of Harkat ul-Mujahideen and Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islam) retreated to Kashmir. Others (like the Lashkar e-Toïba), headed for hideouts in the tribal zones of the North, at Gilgit and Baltistan. But the most radical, Lashkar i-Janghvi, Jaish, and a Harkat subgroup, the Harkat ul-Mujahideen al-Almi-Universal, found refuge in Karachi, and, in particular at Binori. Are they still there? Did I pass an hour in the sanctuary of bin Laden's lost soldiers? Is that what the portraits I saw meant?

The famous audiocassette of 12 November 2002—in which bin Laden spoke of the terrorist attacks in Djerba, Yemen, Kuwait, Bali, and Moscow, and called for new actions not only against U.S. President Bush, but also his European, Canadian, and Australian allies—originated at Binori, and was sent from there through Bangladesh to the Qatar television station of Al Jazeera. A recording studio in a mosque? Binori transformed into a logistics base for al-Qaida propaganda? Yes! This is the hypothesis of the American, British, and Indian intelligence services. They don't know what Bangladesh has to do with it, or to what degree ISI is involved in the operation. But they have no doubt whatsoever that the cassette was put together here, in the depths of the terrorist Vatican.

Finally, Osama bin Laden himself is said to have stayed at Binori on several occasions. The most-wanted terrorist on earth, global Public Enemy Number One, the man worth $25 million or more, this shadowy character who may or may not be alive, or who may survive only as a legend, is said to have stayed here in the center of Karachi right under the nose of the Pakistani police during 2002. A serious wound necessitated special medical treatment (and may explain his silence of the past several months). Binori as a hospital. Binori the sanctuary, inviolable by any authority, where Pakistani military doctors are said to have come with impunity to care for him. Other
madrasas
are said to have given him sanctuary as well. I heard the name Akora Khattak cited several times. A military hospital in Peshawar or Rawalpindi, where he went for treatment of kidney problems in the fall of 2001, just before September 11, has also come up (in
Jane's Intelligence Digest
of 20 September 2001, for example, and on CBS News on 28 January 2002). But the most reliable sources, the most well-informed observers, speak of Binori as the inner sanctum of all sanctuaries. (B. Raman
South Asia Analysis Group
: “Were are all the terrorist gone,” 29 July 2002 and “Al Qaeda, will it or will it not,” 30 August 2002).

Abdul, when I meet him again at the Sheraton bar, the only place in town a Muslim can get a beer or a sandwich during Ramadan, mocks me: “So, the house of the Devil was empty?”

And me, irritated and slightly pompous: “Normal, old friend; the Devil doesn't make appointments; he's at home everywhere, except in his own house; the Demon's laugh, as we all know, is like Minerva's owl—it screeches once you've left, but at the same time . . . ”

Yes, at the same time, perhaps I saw nothing in Binori Town.

Perhaps, I still don't know what Omar came to do or to look for on the 18, 19, and 21 of January in Binori Town.

But I do know a little bit more about the mosque.

I know that this place of prayer and meditation where he spent one of his last nights is a headquarters for al-Qaida in the heart of Karachi.

I know, I feel, that what exists there is a kind of central reactor or machine room of the Organization—right in the middle of Pakistan, not far from the American consulate, a Taliban or post-Taliban enclave, to which the worst of Afghanistan, bin Laden–ists included, have withdrawn.

What if, in reality, the trail of Omar Sheikh passed through Afghanistan?

Is it time, in order to move forward, to return to Afghanistan?

CHAPTER 3
JIHAD MONEY

Stopover, Dubai.

I'm on my way to Afghanistan, but I stop in Dubai.

In the back of my mind, I'm hoping to pick up a trace of Saud Memon.

And, since I'm here, I hope to glean a little information on al-Qaida's finances, networks, trafficking, and how it functions.

We are still at the end of 2002.

It's the beginning of the debate on whether or not to go to war with Iraq.

I'm among those who, at the time, doubt the existence of the famous links between Saddam Hussein's regime and bin Laden's organization, America's justification for the war.

I'm among those who are—regardless of the regime's obviously criminal character—more cognizant of the rivalry between Hussein and bin Laden, and their competition for a supreme emirate, than the possibility of their alliance.

I haven't changed my mind either since my book
Reflexions sur la
Guerre, le Mal, et la Fin de l'Histoire,
finished shortly after September 11, in which I described al-Qaida as an NGO of crime, a cold stateless monster, an organization of a radical new type, which didn't need the support of any major power to prosper, any Leviathan, let alone Iraq.

So I am in Dubai and determined to move on both fronts—that of the book and that of the general debate—in a city I know a little from the coincidence of previous investigations . . .

The first time was during the war in Bosnia—because some of the arms dealers who dared violate the embargo on arms destined for Izetbegovic's army were here. I went to Ankara, but also to Dubai, in 1993–1994, to investigate how one could circumvent the embargo.

Then, in 1998, returning from my stay with Commander Massoud in the Panshir—the chief of his secret services, General Fahim, had explained to me that all the support for the Taliban, all the violations of the UN resolutions that went in their favor, and all their logistics, are connected to the United Arab Emirates. And I had begun to consider two aviation companies, twenty kilometers away, Air Cess and Flying Dolphin, which were at the center of the affair and were based in Sharjah, the neighboring emirate. One furnished spare parts for Mullah Omar's remaining fighter planes, and the other supplied arms and sometimes, in conjunction with the Afghan national airline Ariana, “foreign volunteers.”

And finally, my last visit to Dubai was in 2000, when I was reporting on forgotten wars, particularly on those in Africa. I was finishing my story on Angola, trying to trace missile and canon shipments to Unita, when, to my considerable surprise, I came across the same Air Cess and its nefarious boss, ex-KGB agent Victor Anatolievitch Bout. Cess's planes, used throughout the African wars—notably in the Angolan zones controlled by Jonas Savimbi—were key to the ongoing infernal exchange of arms for diamonds.

I am here, then, in one of the world capitals of dirty money, a nexus for the uncontrollable trafficking of some of the planet's most sinister contraband. But also, and these facts are not unrelated, it is the most open city in the Arab-Muslim world—the wildest and, in a certain way, the most free. Of course I know the limits of this freedom: I know the case of the French woman Touria Tiouli who was thrown in jail because she had the audacity, after being raped in October 2002, to complain publicly. Yet, at the same time I must admit that I never return here without a certain pleasure at finding again the madness and the artifices of Dubai—its lunar landscape, its flavor of a middle eastern Hong Kong or an Arab Las Vegas, its kitsch, its skyscrapers on the beach, its silly submarine restaurants, its steel and glass buildings, its islands shaped like palm trees, and its ice-blue Mexican sky.

I reactivate the old networks from my earlier investigations.

I make contact again with a staff member of the Civil Aviation Ministry, who once told me how some old Iliouchines, long banned from the transport of cargo or passengers, would land at night on the fringes of the airport to load mysterious cargoes unbeknownst to customs or the police.

I find my friend Sultan B., a manager at an Arab bank, who is second-to-none for guidance through the financial maze of offshore accounts, combined with
hawala
—the system of compensation and transfer based on word of honor, which is as old as commerce itself, and, by definition, leaves no trace, no matter how large the transaction.

And, if I find nothing on Memon, if in spite of everything I was told in Karachi about the master of the house of torment, he remains more than ever the invisible man of this affair, I still observe some things about the other aspect, al-Qaida and its finances—and the least of these, which will bring me quite unexpectedly back to the main subject of this book.