Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read Online Free

same wall of cement brick about five feet high. It’s in the first farmhouse that Daniel Pearl was held prisoner.
    This is the route (another exists, but longer, from the other side, and with lots of police) he must have taken.
    And such is the time (one hour, maybe less) of his last journey. A police report based on the deposition of one of the conspirators, Fazal Karim, and repeated by the Pakistani press, speaks of several hours and a change of vehicles—but why? What’s the point, since the victim was trusting?
    These are the principle stages of his transfer into a zone about which too much has been said, but I repeat—it must be remembered when the question is posed as to what the Pakistani police did or did not do to find him alive—that it was said that the zone was out of reach, a jungle. Well, it’s doubtless a lowly place, a disreputable and dangerous area, propitious for all sorts of trafficking and full of the same sort of houses as this one, and where the industry of kidnapping, which flourishes in Karachi, has always had its hideouts. But everyone knows that most of the so-called farms are the refugees of criminals or Islamists. I made the journey and can testify that, apart from this last little stretch, we never leave the city.
    What did Pearl do during this time?
    What could he have been thinking? What went through his mind all along this journey?
    Did he understand that he had fallen into a trap and was not being taken to the interview he had sought with Gilani?
    Did he ask questions? Was he anxious, impatient, angry? Did it become necessary to threaten him? Block the door? Subdue or hit him ?
    A neighbor, whose son is enrolled at the madrasa , says Pearl was seen arriving blindfolded at the gates of the house.
    Of course anything is possible.
    And, assuming this was the case, assuming that after the Super Highway, as they entered the less frequented Sharah e-Mullah Jewan Road, where the flow of traffic ebbs, they took the precaution to tie a scarf over his eyes—it wouldn’t necessarily be cause for alarm. It wouldn’t be the first time a journalist had undergone such measures on his way to meet some personality whose hideout must remain secret. It happened to me in Colombia, when I was being driven deep into Cordoba to see Carlos Castaño the notorious leader of the paramilitary fascists. . . and thirty years ago in Bangladesh, when I was being taken into the western outskirts of Calcutta to the Maoist leader Abdul Motin, wanted by the police of both Bengals. . . .
    But deep down I don’t believe it.
    I can’t see his captors taking the risk of driving around with a blindfolded foreigner.
    Nor do I believe that Pearl, on this route, which I have seen as though through his eyes, found any reason to be afraid.
    My feeling is that he remained more or less confident throughout a journey that a reporter with some experience of Karachi would find normal.
    Possibly some apprehension, a few dark thoughts crossing his mind, but dismissed. I imagine him finding the way a little long, chaotic, but also questioning his companions, scribbling in the pages of his notebook, crooked lines as always when riding in a car, even joking, noting what he sees; PNS Karsaz, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Gulberg, Knightsbridge Restaurant, Bundoo Khan, North Karachi Sind Industrial Estate, Karachi Development Authority. And then, in the last stretch, if he was really blindfolded, a little nervous, on his guard, but continuing to take mentally the notes he can no longer take by hand: noises, odors, the probable distance traveled. And at the very end, after getting out of the car, the last snare—the uneven path he feels under his feet that takes him to the house where at last he will have his interview, happy to be there, taking a deep breath and shaking off the ride in this enclosed space where, according to the kidnapper’s testimony, his first question was, “Where is Gilani?