Speaking of....Pakistan: Pearl Video Too Gruesome to Release
Last Updated: February 23, 2002 01:25 PM ET
reuters.com
By Brian Williams
KARACHI (Reuters) - Pakistan said on Saturday a videotape of the killing of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was too gruesome for public release.
It also stepped up security at all U.S. diplomatic missions and businesses, saying it could not rule out attacks following the death of Pearl, whose body police fear they may never find.
A senior government official said President Pervez Musharraf's military administration had discussed releasing the tape but decided it was too barbaric to air.
The official told Reuters the videotape, sent by the radical Islamic gang suspected of kidnapping Pearl to a newspaper worker who handed it to authorities, showed the reporter's severed head in its last frame.
Earlier parts of the brief tape showed Pearl's throat being cut from behind while he was still talking to the camera.
"It was discussed at the most senior level whether to release this video to television channels, but finally it was decided that even foreign television channels would not be able to show such gruesome scenes," the official said.
"The last scene shows Pearl's head separated from his body."
Earlier an Interior Ministry official said American interests in Pakistan should review their own security and take greater precautions against the radical gang.
"We cannot rule out attacks on U.S. interests in Pakistan after what has happened with Mr. Pearl. The way the kidnappers executed him shows they have made up their mind that they do not care about their own future," the official told Reuters.
"These people do not care if they live or die," the official said. "People must take care."
In another sign of the killers' determination, the official said that the day before the videotape was received, three top Pakistan police officers received calls on Pearl's mobile telephone warning them to drop the hunt.
"They told the investigators how many children each one of them have, when they go to school, which mode of transport they use for going to school and returning back home and where their families go shopping," the official said.
"They had very minute and precise information about the activities of their family members."
PESHAWAR LINK
As security forces fanned out across Pakistan hunting for the Wall Street Journal reporter's killers, opponents of Musharraf criticized police failure to prevent Pearl's execution after kidnappers seized him on January 23.
Police sources said leads were increasingly pointing to the town of Peshawar on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan as a possible hideout for members of the radical Islamic gang suspected of kidnapping and then killing Pearl.
The sources said police also were looking at isolated Baluchistan province, again bordering Afghanistan.
Their prime suspect as the new leader of the gang, with the mastermind of the abduction already in custody, was Amjad Hussain Farooqi, known to Pearl as Imtiaz Siddiqui, the man who invited the reporter to the lunch where he was kidnapped.
Farooqi, from a village in Toba Tek Singh district of Punjab province, about 350 km south of Islamabad, was aged about 40 and known for his militant Islamism.
An authoritative Pakistani police source said police had again questioned suspects in custody, and now feared they may never find Pearl's body as the trail was going cold.
"We are very pessimistic about finding the body because we think he was executed more than one week ago," the source, who did not want to be identified, said.
Pearl, 38, disappeared in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, as he tried to contact Islamic radical groups and investigate possible links between alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid and the al Qaeda network of suspected September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
Pearl, the Journal's South Asian bureau chief, had been based in Bombay, India, for the past two years. He had been working in Karachi for three weeks when he was kidnapped.
In a national television address on Friday night, President Musharraf said all resources were being thrown into the hunt for the reporter's killers and vowed no quarter for Islamic extremists even if they were not involved in the abduction.
The group claiming to hold Pearl called itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty and accused the American of being a spy -- first for the CIA, then for Israeli intelligence.
It said the kidnap was to protest against U.S. treatment of Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners from the Afghan war.
VALUABLE INFORMATION
Police sources said a newspaper worker who received the death videotape and delivered it to the U.S. consulate in Karachi worked for the Peshawar-based Frontier Post.
They described him as either a journalist or a worker in the newspaper's advertising department.
Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider told a news conference on Friday the man had already given police valuable information on the men who gave him the tape.
Pearl's widow Mariane, also a journalist and seven months pregnant with the couple's first child, issued a statement in New York calling her husband's killing an "act of barbarism" but dismissing the idea of revenge as too easy.
Musharraf's main domestic foes, political parties banned when he seized power in October 1999, seized on the murder to demand a return to democracy and to denounce the president's rule.
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