Author:
Publication: The Hindu
Date: February 26, 2002
In October 1994, a gleeful young
kidnapper walked into a house in Saharanpur, near New Delhi, to tell three
British tourists chained to the floor that he had sent authorities an ultimatum:
"Release a group of Islamic militants from Indian jails, or the hostages
will die."
"We've just told the press we're
going to behead you," said Ahmed Omar Sheikh, a 21-year-old who once studied
at the London School of Economics, as Rhys Partridge, one of the hostages,
remembered it. "He was laughing," Mr. Partridge said in a recent interview.
"The prospect excited him."
Sheikh's plans went awry when he
was captured and his captives released. But after five years awaiting trial,
he was freed, along with two other Islamic militants, in exchange for more
than 160 people aboard an Indian Airlines jet that had been hijacked from
Kathmandu, Nepal.
Mr. Partridge was aghast. "I got
to know the guy and I got to know his agenda, and I made it very apparent
to anyone who would listen that he would continue to do this kind of stuff.
He would take hostages again. He would murder people, given the opportunity."
The opportunity may have presented
itself last month when Sheikh, now 28 and close to the Pakistani militant
group, the Jaish-e-Mohammad, apparently enticed the Wall Street Journal
reporter, Daniel Pearl, to a meeting that led to his abduction on January
23 and brutal execution.
Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf,
has vowed to prosecute everyone involved, an inquiry that could well raise
the lid on one of the more unsavoury chapters in this country's recent
history: the ties between radical Islamic groups and Pakistan's main intelligence
service.
ISI links
Military and intelligence officials
disclosed that a Pakistani intelligence officer, Abdullah, played a key
role in nurturing the Jaish after its formation in 2000. Brig. Abdullah
was among those pushed aside late last year as Gen. Musharraf began his
shake-up of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Sheikh told a Pakistani court earlier
this month and American and Pakistani interrogators that he helped kidnap
Pearl. But his statements raised as many questions as they answered. Did
he act with accomplices and, if so, was a former Pakistani police official
among them, as some say? Was someone giving orders to him? If so, why have
they not been apprehended? Why was Sheikh allowed to turn himself in to
a former ISI official on February 5, and why did the local police issue
misleading statements for a week indicating that he was still at large?
The intelligence agency's past actions
indicate that its interests - or, at a minimum, those of former officials
- have often dovetailed with the interests of Pearl's kidnappers, as reflected
in their original demands. New disclosures of links between Sheikh and
two recently-dismissed agency officials only intensify suspicions about
ISI's role in this case.
When Sheikh was freed from an Indian
prison in 1999, he and two other freed prisoners became affiliated with
the Jaish. It was one of the several militant groups with close links to
Pakistani intelligence, particularly to Brig. Abdullah, who headed the
ISI's Kashmir department.
All this raises a delicate issue
for Gen. Musharraf and also for the United States, which has forged a much
closer relationship with Pakistan since September 11. Two days before the
kidnapping of Pearl, the American Ambassador in Islamabad asked Pakistan
to hand over Sheikh in connection with the 1994 kidnapping, in which an
American was also held captive. Before Pakistan did anything, Pearl was
abducted.
Support to militants
After the Soviet Union withdrew
from Afghanistan in 1989, the onset of a guerrilla war in Kashmir gave
the agency a politically more potent reason for being - as the force to
nurture a guerrilla conflict against India, through the proxy of militant
Islamic groups.
The U.S. Government grew increasingly
concerned about the activities of its former partner. That year, in a confidential
letter to Nawaz Sharif, then Pakistan's Prime Minister, President George
Bush Sr. quietly warned that he might have to declare Pakistan a terrorist
state if the cross-border attacks on India, paid for and orchestrated by
the ISI, did not cease, according to a former Pakistani official who said
he had seen the letter.
The rise of the Taliban only added
to that Pakistani- American gulf. While the U.S. soured on the force, Pakistan,
through its intelligence agency, helped sustain it, solidifying links built
on kinship, Islamic solidarity and longstanding personal and institutional
allegiance. Similar ties were being forged with various militant groups
based in Pakistan, who were recruiting young Muslim men to join them.
Even as he pledges to find the rest
of the kidnappers, Gen. Musharraf is pursuing a broader crackdown on militants,
promised in January, with 2,000 arrests announced so far. The purpose is
to rein in the Islamic extremist organisations that Pakistan had condoned
or supported over the years. And within the ISI, he has begun what military
and intelligence officials describe as a major purge, including the effective
dismantling of the Kashmir and Afghanistan cells.
One of the first to go, according
to those officers, was Brig. Abdullah, head of the Kashmir cell who helped
forge ties with the Jaish and, those officers assert, helped facilitate
Sheikh's frequent travels between Afghanistan and Pakistan, his ancestral
home.
The overlapping of the crackdown,
the intelligence purge and Pearl's murder have added to the mystery surrounding
the crime, including the question of whether it might have been carried
out with the knowledge or support of current or former Pakistani intelligence
officials.
Conflicting reports
One of the four suspects now in
police custody for the kidnapping has been identified as Sheikh Mohammad
Adeel, a former constable in a special branch of the Karachi police that
had responsibility for terrorism. And even today, no one in authority has
resolved conflicting accounts of where Sheikh was between February 5, when
he said he turned himself in, and February 12, when his arrest was announced.
During the intervening week, Pakistani
police officials gave optimistic interviews indicating that they were on
the verge of capturing Sheikh. But this weekend, two law enforcement officials
confirmed that Sheikh had turned himself in on February 5 to the Punjab
Home Secretary and former ISI official, Shah.
If there was any collusion between
operatives and militants, intelligence officials now insist, it would almost
certainly have involved former ISI officers, rather than those now serving
under Ehsan, who was formerly Director of Military Intelligence. Gen. Musharraf
installed him as the ISI chief last fall with a mandate to sever ties with
terrorist groups.
But after so many years of tangled
ties between Pakistan's Government and the militants, few even now claim
to understand the full picture, and they say that the murder of Pearl has
only underscored how fraught the situation remains.
"Our journey is not a short one
to control the terrorists," the Interior Minister, Moinuddin Haider, said
this week.
The New York Times
