What Really Happened To Daniel Pearl
Compelling long read,"Daniel Pearl's Final Story," at Washingtonian.com by his friend, Asra Q. Nomani. An excerpt:
Danny thought he'd be back at my house in Karachi from his interview by 9 pm. At 10, there was no sign of him, so Mariane and I flipped open his laptop to look for clues about his meeting. We found his source immediately. The man had written Danny from nobadmashi@yahoo.com. In Urdu, a native tongue of Pakistan, badmashi means troublemaker.It seemed like an attempt to mock Danny, and I was instantly angry with myself for not having paid more attention to the nuances of the story he was chasing--had I seen that e-mail address, I could have warned him.
I spent the night working the phone for leads, and the next day Pakistani policemen swarmed my home. It didn't feel right to sit back and watch them, waiting for news. As a journalist, I felt I had to investigate, too. I covered the dining-room wall in blank paper and wrote DANNY on the sheet in the middle; from there, I could map the connections among the people we came across. I'd used the tool while reporting a Journal story about tantric sex, when I'd had trouble keeping straight the different teachers and their students-slash-sex-partners. Danny had thought that was funny, and I imagined how hard he would laugh when he turned up and I could tell him we'd cracked his case thanks to my tantric-sex reporting.
Along with two of my Journal colleagues, Mariane and I chased every lead from our makeshift command center on Zamzama Street, and each day Mariane sat in front of a small shrine to chant her Buddhist mantra, praying for Danny to return. One night in the fifth week of the search, a team of Pakistani police officers, FBI agents, and State Department officials came to the house.
"I'm sorry, Mariane," Mir Zubair Mahmood, the lead Pakistani investigator, said. "I couldn't bring your Danny home."
"No!" Mariane yelled, running to the bedroom where Danny had slept his last night of freedom. I was silent as I followed and took a seat outside her door, repeating to myself a prayer for protection that my mother had taught me as a child: "In the name of God, the beneficent, the merciful . . . ."
Mariane emerged. "How do we know it's true?" she asked me.
I took her question back to the group. It was John Bauman, then the US consul general in Karachi, who spoke: "They slashed his throat. They pressed on his jugular vein so his blood would gush out."
The next morning, it rained for the first time during my five months in Karachi. Finally, I sobbed.
Call it cynicism, but proper repulsion at Pearl's abject murder has suffered distraction by the portrayal of his wife in sanctimonious Jolie movies.
Crid [CridComment at Gmail] at January 24, 2014 2:10 AM
I'm not understanding the title, didn't we already know that's what really happened to Daniel Pearl?
Sad article, though...
NicoleK at January 24, 2014 11:32 AM
Amy Alkon
https://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2014/01/what-really-hap-2.html#comment-4219157">comment from NicoleKThis is the inside scoop. The little bits, personal bits, we didn't know, and more.
Amy Alkon
at January 24, 2014 12:20 PM
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