Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read Free Page B

deemed highly sensitive, and to be on the safe side, announce oneself to the informal authorities in the vicinity and to the Aghan refugee camps one passes through.
    From the Village Garden in the middle of the city—where Omar Sheikh, the leader of the abductors, had fixed their rendezvous—take Sharah e-Faisal, the avenue of King Faisal, which goes up toward the airport and follow it about twenty minutes. It’s a good road, reassuring, going through the business quarters, a marine base, retired veterans’ residential neighborhoods, the Air Force museum, the Jinnah museum as well as the Finance and Trade Center where the main offices of several large Pakistani banks are grouped.
    Then make a left on Rashid Minhas Road, which is again a large avenue with a strong army presence: on the right, the “ordnance depot,” on the opposite sidewalk, another group of residences for retired officers, a cinema, the “Aladin” theme park, with its aquatic playgrounds, its video and shopping arcades, the crowded Iqbal gardens, the National Institute of Public Information, a university for adults where upper-level bureaucrats are retrained. Here, too, the traffic is light, a perfectly calm road. An impression of normal life, at least on the day of my passage—and why would it have been otherwise the day Pearl made the trip?
    After about ten minutes, maybe fifteen, we turn east and get on the Super Highway, a four-lane highway, the “lifeline” of Pakistan, which heads toward Hyderabad. We pass through the Sorhab Goth quarter with its terminal for buses and trucks, a vegetable market, an interminable kind of compound without trees or vegetation, built on the ruins of the Pashtun areas destroyed in the 1980s, a village of Afghan refugees, numerous little restaurants where pulao and tea is served with, as in Kabul, dishes of sugar-coated almonds, a restaurant under construction; modest buildings, poorer than on Rashid Minhas, but no more or less than certain quarters in central Karachi. Nothing there, either, that might alert Pearl. Nothing that would lead him to think he was entering some far-off and terrifying no-man’s-land.
    Left again just after the restaurant under construction. Another large artery, in worse condition, but quite acceptable; Mehran Avenue. A sign indicates the Karachi Institute of Information Technology, another, Dreamworld Family Resort, a sort of playground where young Pakistanis organize the equivalent of our rave parties. Others announce Maymar Apartments, or Ghulshan e-Maymar Complex, or Karachi Development Authority, a quasi-governmental institution for urban development, or, visible on the left, the Dawat Academy International University, whose construction is at a standstill, with only the adjacent mosque completed. Here, suddenly, the landscape turns bleak. There is something sinister in these vacant lots and half-finished houses whose lower floors are squatted, the eucalyptus trees that never quite finish dying of thirst. But it’s still not the end-of-the-world atmosphere, the hell, the impenetrable and sordid lower depths that was described to us when it became necessary to explain the failure of the Pakistani police to find the American journalist.
    And then, left again on a narrower street, Sharah e-Mullah Jewan Road, where for the first time—by now we’ve been on the road almost an hour—the landscape really changes. More vacant land and rocky terrain with scattered garbage dumps, few houses, the street deserted, no cars, no pedestrians. A few minutes more, then we park and walk the last 200 meters. Off to the right about 500 meters away is a large abandoned house topped with a television antenna. Eight hundred yards further is the madrasa Jamia Rashidia with its soccer field, and behind it, hovels, apparently abandoned. Finally, between the big house with the antenna and the madrasa , are two farmhouses facing each other and surrounded by the