| Submit your comments on this article |
| Terror Networks |
| Pearl Case: Wonder what they're really doing? |
| 2002-02-15 |
Immediately after the arrest, Omar was transported from Lahore to Karachi and handed over to a joint interrogation team comprising officials from the intelligence department of the police, Inter-Services Intelligence, Intelligence Bureau, and Military Intelligence. Until Wednesday morning, Omar did not mention the whereabouts of Daniel Pearl and insisted that he was not involved in the case. However, Omar gave the names of his contacts in Karachi; the subsequent police raid unearthed no clue about Pearl's whereabouts. The Pearl case is odd in that the investigation changes course in midstream, deviating toward areas not directly related to the case. For instance, initially it was said that Pearl had been in touch with the Harkat ul Mujahadeen, but suddenly investigations shifted to Jamiat ul Fuqrah. Mubarak Ali Jilani, the chief of Jamiat ul Fuqrah, appeared before police officials and was arrested. Interrogation revealed that he had no link with the Pearl kidnapping. However, he is still being interrogated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency over his links in the US and India. Many details have unfolded about Jilani's followers in Florida, mostly African-American Muslims who finance his organization with large, regular donations. After Jilani, a former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) official, Khalid Khawaja was interrogated, released, and again arrested. Khawaja retired in the late 1980s and was a close associate of Osama bin Laden. When he was picked up during the Pearl investigations, he proudly admitted that he had been a close friend of bin Laden but had nothing to do with the kidnapping. All investigating agencies, including those of the US, gave him a clean bill of health as far as the Pearl case was concerned. However, a few days ago he was arrested again for investigation into his links with bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Aslam Khan Shirani is another example of the strange fish being netted in the Pearl investigation. Shirani has never been an ISI offiical. He is a private citizen who was involved in the Afghan war during the Soviet occupation. He was on the ISI's payroll to recruit and train volunteers for the Afghan jihad, and operated a training camp near Peshawar University until 1991. After the then director general of ISI, Lt Gen Hamid Gul, was removed, the camp was closed. But his arrest is likely to open a new Pandora's box, and many high-profile names are likely to be affected by his investigation. Judging by the pattern of investigations into the Pearl case so far, even if Pearl's fate remains a mystery, investigations will continue for a long time - until several networks of militant groups are exposed and broken. It sounds like they're using the investigation to pull out information on the upper echelons of the jihadi groups. Hopefully this means Musharraf's serious about dismantling the state-within-a-state that's caused Pakistan to fail and to export its failure to Afghanistan and Kashmir. Maybe they're trying to get the goods on Hamid Gul as well. All this is doing nothing to get Pearl back and it's probable there's no coming back from where he is now. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |