Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read Online Free Page A

Where is the man I’m supposed to meet?” At this point Bukhari, who led this little convoy on his motorcycle and would soon direct the execution, put a fraternal arm around Pearl’s shoulders and with the other hand stuck a gun in his ribs. But even then, he didn’t believe it. Even with a gun in his side, even hearing Bukhari tell him with a big smile, “Now, you are kidnapped,” he still believed it was a kind of joke and waited until he was taken in to the house, searched and undressed, before beginning to comprehend what was happening to him.
    Behind him—and today behind me—the house of Saud Memon, the owner of the property.
    Next to it, the two-story house of Fazal Karim, Memon’s driver who witnessed the scene and most likely held Pearl’s head during the execution, and eventually cut the body into ten pieces.
    A few hundred yards away, the madrasa Jamia Rashidia, whose students testify they neither saw nor heard anything until the sixth day— two days before the murder—when the American took advantage of a trip to the toilet to try to escape through an air vent. From the roof of the school they saw Fazal Karim and another retaliating with blows and a bullet fired into his leg: “You’re going to pay now, you’re going to crawl like a worm in the dirt . . . ”
    On the other side of the street, curtained by acacias with white plastic bags hanging from their branches, are two buildings under construction that wouldn’t have been there at the time. Desire of the police to see the area inhabited? To encourage development?
    There, under his feet and today under mine, so perfectly quiet that the echo of my steps on the twigs and palm leaves that cover the ground is deafening, the small courtyard, planted as well with acacias, palms, bamboo, and mango trees, is where the remains of his tortured body were found. Like the bodies of saints, it was accompanied by meager relics: three pieces of faded green rope, anti-diarrhea pills, two car seats, a piece of the top of his track suit, three bloodstained plastic sacks used to wrap his dismembered body. What learned art of torture! How, with a knife, and before rigor mortis, does one cut a body into so many pieces?
    And here, sheltered by a wall with large black letters indicating the direction to the National Public School and further hidden from sight by another dense row of green acacias, is the concrete block building, a narrow rectangle with its two rooms and no electricity (although the rest of the neighborhood is electrified), low ceilinged (I have to lower my head, I imagine he did too), damp and smelling of rotten apples and wet plaster (water from rudimentary cistern overflows into the room). Here is where he spent six days and six nights, where he was interrogated, brought back after trying to escape, and where he was finally killed, then dismembered, on the night of the 31st, although his killers still had the effrontery to demand a ransom from the Wall Street Journal and his family. The Golgotha of Daniel Pearl. The scene of his Calvary. Daniel Pearl naked, pitiful and bleeding, like the Chinese youth who by order of Prince Ao-Han-Ouan was sliced up alive, and whose agony, eyes rolled up, face ecstatic, his smile stiffened by suffering, had so impressed Georges Bataille—the famous “torture of a hundred pieces” from Coupable and The Interior Experience.
    Has the place been changed? Reoccupied?
    I don’t think so; everything seems, on the contrary, as it was.
    The same metal gate, padlocked and sealed by the police, with its cascade of white and red bougainvilleas that now cover half of it.
    The same surrounding wall that I scale at the very place where I imagine Pearl tried to escape, among the trees near the trench dug along the wall to serve as a septic ditch, and the mound of well-tamped dirt he must have noticed upon his arrival.
    The same abandoned garden, full of insects, and