ISLAMABAD, 17 July — During the trial of journalist Daniel Pearl’s murderers, one small but disturbing fact never made its way into the headlines: that one of the co-accused was a former Pakistani police officer.
The final testimony of the trial — released only yesterday morning — must owe something to his own evidence. It revealed, for example, that Pearl made two escape attempts from his captors and that it was this which prompted them to murder him. Three Yemenis were brought in to perform his throat cutting. But all we know of the ex-cop is that — even at the time of his arrest — he was still working for the Pakistan Special Branch.
Little wonder, then, that the American FBI is almost as distrustful of its Pakistani counterpart as the CIA is of the warlords across the border in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the powerful state institution which helped arm Afghan fighters against the Soviets and then supported the Taleban, was supposedly reformed once President Pervez Musharraf joined US President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism’’. Few in Pakistan believe it.
There are rumors, for example, that Pakistani intelligence officers helped to hide three Al-Qaeda members after a gunbattle in the Waziristan village of Kazha Panga in the border tribal territories on June 25 in which 10 Pakistani soldiers and two Al-Qaeda men were killed.
US agents in Pakistan suspect that several of their raids on remote villages in Waziristan — carried out alongside the Pakistani military — were betrayed to Al-Qaeda operatives in advance. Since then, both the FBI and the Pakistan Army have preferred not to inform local police officers of their activities.
Although authorities in Islamabad insist that US forces cannot operate alone inside Pakistani territory, recent reports from Waziristan suggest the contrary. Last week, for example, three Pakistani tribesmen were apparently picked up by US troops from the Pakistani border town of Angoor Adda. One of them was Sarai Khan of the Tojikhel Wazir tribe, another was Maulvi Ahmed Shah and the third was his elderly father Zarpao Khan who was supposedly seized to secure the capture of his son.
If the Pakistani government can deny America’s undercover war on its territory, it is far more difficult to conceal the involvement of a police Rangers inspector in the conspiracy to murder Musharraf during his visit to Karachi on April 26.
Inspector Waseem Akhtar of the Rangers was supposed to inform members of the Harkat-ul Mujahedeen Al-Aalmi of Musharraf’s movements. Even more disturbing is evidence that the explosives to be used in the failed attack on the president were subsequently employed in the suicide bombing of the US Consulate in Karachi on June 14. Akhtar is now to be court-martialed but his trial — which might reveal his direct connections with the consulate bombing — will almost certainly be held in secret. (The Independent)
