Danny Pearl’s last story from Bahawalpur, Pakistan

In late December 2001, my friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, traveled to Bahawalpur, Pakistan, in the country’s Punjab province, to see if Gen. Pervez Musharraf was actually enforcing the crackdown he claimed he was imposing on Pakistan’s homegrown terrorist organizations.

He found one organization — Jaish-e-Muhammad — open for business.

This week, India had a targeted military strike against Jaish-e-Muhammad’s headquarters in Bahawalpur, in retaliation for a recent murder rampage by terrorists from Pakistan into India’s Kashmir territory.

India’s Operation Sindhoor killed Abdul Rauf Azhar in the airstrike on Bahawalpur. To be clear, based on my years of reporting, Azhar was not involved in the kidnapping or murder of Danny. But in 1999, he masterminded the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which forced India to release three terrorists— including his brother, Masood Azhar, and a British Pakistani, Omar Sheikh, who would go on to lure Danny into captivity.

Abdul Rauf Azhar opened the prison door that allowed a kidnapper to walk free.

In the Pearl Project, a nonprofit journalism initiative, we investigated Danny’s murder, and we have a scan of Danny’s last article from Bahawalpur, published in the Asian Wall Street Journal, its archives not easily available online now.

To honor Danny and the warning he worked hard to give us, I am reprinting his entire article here, missing only the last words which aren’t decipherable currently in the PDF.

He emailed this article to his mother, Ruth Pearl, with a warning: “Don’t freak out too much about my story in today’s paper.”

We can all trust Danny’s reporting. And decades later the terrorism factory that continues to exist in Pakistan must be shut down.

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Asian Wall Street Journal

Militant groups in Pakistan thrive despite crackdown

Wednesday, January 2, 2002

Daniel Pearl 

BAHAWALPUR, Pakistan: The US, stepping up efforts to avoid war between India and Pakistan, is encouraging Pakistan's attempts to crackdown on militant groups suspected in a Dec. 13 attack on lndia's Parliament.

But in Bahawalpur, headquarters of a militant group called Jaish-e-Muhammad, the crackdown, so far, doesn’t look so harsh.

Members of Jalsh-e-Muhammad on Sunday said the group is still operating. They say provincial police officers rang the doorbell of the administrative office early last week and herded staffers into waiting vans. but left behind enough people to keep the office running. Police detained 37 people. but didn't ask them about the group's alleged participation in recent terrorist strikes in India, a group spokesman said. All the police wanted was the location of Jaish-e--Muhammad's leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, who ended up surrendering voluntarily to police near Karachi on Wednesday, group members said.

A nearby Jalsh-e-Muhammad regional centre was still operating Thursday, Its traditional recruiting day. The group's name has been painted over,  but the posters praising holy war are still hung inside. And a bank account that Jaish-e-Muhammad uses to solicit contributions remains open, despite a November order by Pakistan's central bank freezing the group's accounts.

Jaish-e-Muhammad has denied any involvement in the Indian Parliament attack. as well as an October attack on the assembly building in Srinagar, capital of India-controlled Kashmir. Still, the group !s one of several Pakistan-based organisations that have sent fighters and funds into India-controlled Kashmir to help fuel a separatist movement there. And Jaish-e-Muhammad’s fate has become central to whether India will take military action against the groups. Even if India were to confine its actions to India-controlled Kashmir, fighting could spill over Into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and engulf the two adversaries in a full-­scale war. India and Pakistan have continued to amass troops at their borders and evacuated some border villages. A bus link launched in 1999 between Lahore and New Delhi made Its final run Saturday. and as of today there will be no direct airplane or train trips between India and Pakistan either, as a result of tit-for-tat economic measures Initiated by India. 

Also, Pakistan's telecommunication authority this weekend banned the showing of Indian satellite television channels on cable networks In Pakistan “poisonous-propaganda against Pakistan." The ban also included News Corp.'s STAR TV. While most of STAR’s South Asia programming is generated in lndia, a spokesman for STAR TV In India said its news programmes officially aren't shown in Pakistan, and could only be seen by smuggling decoder boxes from India. 

Diplomatic initiatives were complicated by Indian Prime Minister Atal Blhart Vajpayee’s refusal to meet Pakistani military leader Gen. Per­vez Musharraf on the sidelines of a regional sum­mit in Nepal later this week. British Prime Minister Tony Blair Is expected to visit India and Pakistan soon In an effort to defuse tensions. 

President George W. Bush telephoned Mr. Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf over the weekend to urge restraint, and the US may send a special envoy later in the month. Mr. Bush, in the phone conversation, urged Gen. Musharraf to "take additional strong and decisive measures to elim­inate the extremists who seek to harm India," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. Gen. Musharraf gathered Pakistan’s top politicians in the capital Sunday to discuss his response to tensions with India.

India, in order to avoid military action, is demanding clear evidence that Pakistan has cracked down on Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba, two groups India blames for the Oec.13 attack. On Friday, President Bush said Pakistan had arrested 50 members of militant groups, but Pakistani officials Sunday couldn't verify that claim. Jaish-e-Muhammad officials said no mem­bers were arrested after Wednesday, and a Lashkar-e-Taiba spokesman said none of the group's members have been arrested. 

Pakistan has been "gelling hold of anybody indulging in undesirable activities" a Foreign Minister spokesman said Sunday, but said he couldn't provide a number, and added that the arrests were unrelated lo the India attacks. Police arrested Mr. Azhar, the head of Jaish-e-Muhammad, because he "made certain speeches to Incite people to violence," Gen. Rashid Qureshi, spokesman for Pak­lstan's military government said last week, adding that police found unlicensed weapons –  five Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifles, two rifles and pistols –  in their raids. 

Gen. Qureishi left the door open for a wider crackdown on Jaish-e-Muhammad saying, “If the Indians provide us any shred of evidence. we would like to assist them.” Gen. Musharraf had been trying to root out sectarian groups even before the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the US, not because they send fighters into India-controlled Kashmir but because they have been associated with sectarian violence within Pakistan. Mr. Azhar, for example, has been blamed for killings of Shia Muslims in Pakistan. 

Mr. Azhar was relatively unknown in Pakistan before he was arrested by Indian authorities in  Kashmir in 1994.Then he was released in 1999 as part of a deal negotiated by hijackers of an !ndian Airlines flight from Nepal, and he formed Jaish-e-­Muhamrnad in a blaze of publicity after his release. Jaish-e-Muhammad was considered a favourite among the militant groups that receive unofficial Pakistani support. Its operatives drove expensive “double-cabin” Hilux pickup trucks, some with government license plates. The group claims to have sent thousands of fighters into Kashmir and says its biweekly magazine has a circulation of 50,000 in Pakistan and abroad.

A July issue of the magazine urges readers to “come forward and be a supporter of the warriors of Islam" from "Kashmir to Palestine." It suggests writing a check or draft in the name of Mufti Rafeeq Ahmed, the group’s office administrator, and lists an account at Allied Bank in Bahawalpur. At the bank branch Friday, assistant manager Muslim Bhatti said he knows of the Pakistan central bank notice freezing Jaish-e-Muhammad accounts. but that the account listed in the ad was a personal account. “We have not closed any accounts," he said. “We have  20.0000 accounts, and none belongs to Jaish-e-Muhammad.” 

Pressure from India and the US may force Jaish-e-Muhammad further underground. The Jaish-e-Muhammad office is an unmarked house in a dirt-road neighbourhood. Doorways around a small open courtyard are marked finances, guest house No. 2 and administration. But Jasih-e-Muhammad activists say they moved files and computers to secret locations four days before the raids began, and Mr. Azhar appointed a deputy – also secret – to keep running the office in absence.

In the accounting office Thursday evening, Hasan Burki, a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad’s central executive committee, arrived, placed his three mobile phones on a desk, and denounced India for trying to "compare the freedom fighters with the Taliban.” Mr. Burki said he told Pakistani authorities that if they didn't supply a good reason for the raids, Jaish-e-Muhammad would mount a court challenge. "The government, to make Amer­ica happy, we fear, can go to any extent," Mr. Burki said. Jaish-e-Muhammad's supporters are angry, and “we may be unable to control those masses,” he said. 

There are other problems for Jaish-e-Muhammad. Kashmiris have come to resent the way outside groups use the Kashmir cause to raise money. “We want our movement to be an indigenous movement," says Ghulam Mobammed Safi. a leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. an umbrella group of Kashrn!r separatist parties. Bahawalpur, a cotton-farming district In the Punjab province, is nearly halfway across Pakistan from Kashmir. 

Also, poorly organised Pakistani jihad fighters were routed in embarrassing fashion to Afghanistan. making it that much harder to attract fresh warriors. At Jaish-e-Muhammad's regional recruitment office, on the corner of a res­idential street, Meher Khateem sat behind a low desk in an office room decorated with slogans such as "If you don't rise to the occasion now, the Muslim nation will be finished” and signs saying “In the guesthouse, political discussion is prohibited.” It was Thursday, traditional recruiting day, and Mr. Khateem was waiting for people to show up to register for jihad…. 

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