Former WSJ journalist recalls how her colleague Daniel Pearl was betrayed by Pakistan government and terrorists after he witnessed terror camps in Bahawalpur
As India razed to the ground nine terrorist sites in Pakistan and PoJK, including the JeM headquarters in Bahawalpur, under Operation Sindoor, former Wall Street Journal (WSJ) journalist Asra Nomani recalled how her colleague American journalist Daniel Pearl was brutally assassinated by terrorists when he went to Bahawalpur to report on terrorist groups there. Nomani described Bahawalpur as a “base for homegrown domestic terrorists” of Pakistan.
“I still have chills in my heart from when I first heard that town’s name in late January 2002. For the 23 years since, I have reported on how Pakistani intelligence and military leaders have used that city — Bahawalpur — in the southern province of Punjab, as a base for its homegrown domestic terrorists,” Nomani wrote on X on Thursday (8th May). “When I heard India bombed training camps in Pakistan this week in Operation Sindoor, in response to a Pakistani terrorist rampage in India’s Kashmir state, I had one city’s name on my lips: Bahawalpur,” Nomani added.
Asra Nomani said that Daniel Pearl went to Bahawalpur just after Gen. Pervez Musharraf promised to shut down terrorist groups in the country after the terror attack on Indian parliament, and Pearl had reported on the terrorist camps in Bahawalpur. She wrote, “My friend, WSJ reporter Danny Pearl, went to Bahawalpur in December 2001 with a notebook and a pen. Gen. Pervez Musharraf had just promised he was shutting down Pakistan’s militant groups after a strike by Pakistan’s terrorists against the Parliament in India, and Danny reported on the militant offices in Bahawalpur.”
Notably, among the 9 sites targeted by India in Operation Sindoor, the most prominent site was Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur, the main centre of Jaish-e-Mohammad for training and indoctrination of youth. This centre serves as the operational headquarters of JeM, and is associated with terrorist planning, including the Pulwama attack on February 14, 2019. The Markaz also consists of residences of JeM Chief Maulana Masood Azhar, de-facto Chief of JeM Mufti Abdul Rauf Asghar, Maulana Ammar and other family members. Several family members and associates of Masood Azhar were killed in the Indian strike on this facility.
Nomani added in her post on X, “He literally knocked on their doors. Dear Dr. @yudapearl, this story is a window into Danny’s reporting enterprise. And because people will wonder: Danny was no cowboy. This was a calculated low-risk reporting trip because no journalist had been targeted for kidnapping in Pakistan. Around that time, Danny sent me an email: “I’m anxious to go to Afghanistan, but I’m not anxious to die.”
She wrote that Pearl found that militant training camps were open for business in Bahawalpur. As per her, one Asif Farooqi had arranged an interview for Daniel Pearl through Arif, a PR man for Harkutul Mujahadeen. “I learned Danny’s fixer, Asif Farooqi, had arranged an interview for Danny through a man named “Arif.” Danny didn’t know it but Arif was the PR man for a militant group, Harkutul Mujahadeen. What was Arif’s hometown? Bahawalpur. The police launched a manhunt to find Arif in Bahawalpur. We learned Arif’s family faked a funeral for Arif. Police found him trying to board a bus in Muzaffarabad, across the country by Pakistan’s border with Kashmir,” she wrote.
She added, “Arif had handed Danny off to Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani dropout from the London School of Economics, radicalised in the 1990s in London mosques.” Notably, Omar Sheikh was arrested and jailed in India, but was released in exchange for hostages of the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814, along with Masood Azhar. Nomani said that Pakistan didn’t jail Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar after their release from Indian jails, but gave them safe passage. “They used them as weapons against India,” she added.
Nomani said that under the obsession to take over Kashmir, Pakistan failed to act against terrorist bases on its land. “Pakistan has had a duty to dismantle those terrorist bases — for even the safety of its own people. What India is doing is a strategic attack on terrorist bases, Pakistani military and intelligence should have eliminated but never did in their obsession to take over Kashmir,” she said.
Who was Daniel Pearl?
Daniel Pearl was the South Asia Chief of the WSJ, who went to Pakistan in December 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack to work on stories about terrorist organisations there. He has taken a regional posting in Mumbai before travelling to Pakistan to cover the Global War on Terrorism, a military campaign launched by the US after 9/11. As Nomani tells in her post on X, Daniel Pearl was looking to get an interview with a member of a terrorist organisation. A man named Asif Farooqi had arranged an interview for Pearl through a man named Arif, who was a PR person for the terrorist group named Harkatul Mujahideen. According to Nomani, Pearl’s trip to Bahawalpur was supposed to be a low-risk reporting trip because no incident of kidnapping of a journalist by terrorists had been reported so far from Pakistan. During his visit to Bahawalpur, Pearl found terrorist camps being run in the area.
Pearl disappeared in Karachi, Pakistan, on January 23, 2001. He was taken into a car for what he believed was an exclusive interview with an Islamic leader. Unfortunately, he was abducted and held in captivity. Four days later, a terrorist group named ‘the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty’, said to be an offshoot of JeM, sent an email with the pictures of Pearl held in captivity with his hands chained. One of the pictures showed someone putting a gun to his head. Pearl was held in captivity for a week before being brutally killed. His assassination was recorded in a video by his killers. In the video, Pearl was seen condemning the US foreign policy and repeatedly saying that he and his family were Jewish. After this, his head was severed from his body.
Daniel Pearl in captivity
Days before his abduction, Pearl met a British-born Pakistani terrorist, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who had a track record of kidnapping Westerners. Sheikh had reportedly used a fake name and pretended to be a follower of the Islamic cleric that Pearl wanted to interview. Sheikh, along with JeM founder Masood Azhar, was among the terrorists who were released in a trade-off for hostages by the Indian government during the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814. “Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani dropout from the London School of Economics, radicalised in the 1990s in London mosques. He went to Pakistan to train in these militant training camps. Then he kidnapped tourists in India. He was caught and jailed, but on Dec. 31, 1999, he was traded for hostages in the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814,” Nomani said.
Ironically, Pearl was known as someone who was particularly sensitive to sentiments in the Islamic world and was committed to explaining them to people in the West.
How Operation Sindoor brought justice for Pearl
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and three other suspects were charged on March 21, 2002, for their role in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. They were convicted on July 15, 2002, and Sheikh was granted a death sentence. In April 2020, the High Court of Sindh acquitted Sheikh and his accomplices on the charges of murder and reduced the sentence to 7 years’ imprisonment for kidnapping. In February 2021, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered Sheikh to be put in a government safe house where he was allowed visits by his family and children.
On March 10, 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an Al-Qaeda operative said to be third in command under Osama Bin Laden, claimed responsibility for personally beheading Pearl. “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” Sheikh Mohammed reportedly said during a confession. He is currently under the detention of the US authorities.
Though Daniel Pearl’s killers could not be brought to book and continued to walk free under the protection of their patrons in Pakistan, India’s Operation Sindoor against terror camps, in a way, avenged Pearl’s death. The operation has brought peace to those who suffered the effects of terrorism and who could not have hoped for justice through a legal course.
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