Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read Online Free PDF Page A

newspaper is behind him. Except this time they must have taped it to the dark blue fabric and so his hands are free. I can’t see the fingers on the right hand, hidden beyond the top of the frame. But I do see his arm, upheld in a strange gesture that could be triumphant, or saying goodbye, or obscene. As for the fingers of his other hand, they’re hidden by his thigh and invisible to the jailers standing on his left—but if you look closely, particularly at the position of the ring finger, which seems to me to be slightly stiffened and pulled back from the other fingers, I have the distinct impression that he is discreetly miming a “Fuck you!” visible only to us, who will receive this image. Is Pearl joking? “V” for victory on one hand . . . “Fuck you” on the other . . . Is he sending us a message, and what is it? One thing is unmistakable. It’s his mischievous, almost joyous face. It’s that perfectly relaxed smile. It’s that hair standing up, as if in flames. It’s that relaxed, almost nonchalant stance. At that point, he’s been a prisoner for six days. He’s somewhere deep inside Karachi in a squalid room of only a few square feet. He’s in the hands of men he obviously realizes are not only Islamists but killers. His glasses have been taken away from him. They may have been broken. He’s badly fed. According to the testimony of one of his guards, after hearing his kidnappers use the word “injection,” and fearing they were going to inject poison into his food, he even went on a hunger strike for two days, and started eating again only on the condition that one of his guards taste his sandwiches first. His hands have been tied, his legs chained. Now he’s going to die in a few hours. And yet he has the relaxed look of a guy who decides, finally, that the situation he’s in is interesting—he has the look you put on when you want to reassure your loved ones, or when you have good reason not to worry.
    There are other mysteries, many other mysteries, which I won’t elucidate, in the Pearl affair.
    There’s the police report, for instance, that I read in Karachi, in which Fazal, who doesn’t speak English but understands it, testified that on the very last day he saw one of the Yemenis who had come to kill Pearl go up to him, and talk to him in a language which Fazal could not understand—and Pearl’s face lit up, then clouded over again, and then he gave a long answer, shouting, in the same language. What language, then? French? Hebrew? Those were the two other languages Pearl spoke. But a Yemeni speaking French . . . or Hebrew. . . And saying what? How very strange.
    There are all those images that present other kinds of problems to the investigators, to the forensic labs in Lahore and other places, and now, to the writer—starting, of course, with the famous video sent by the kidnappers, after the execution, to the American consulate in Karachi and which I watched, and watched again. Why doesn’t Pearl struggle more when the hand with the long knife enters the frame? Why don’t you see the blood flow? Why does his face, in the last phase of the throat slitting, already have that corpse-like rigidity? When the other hand comes from behind, grabs hold of his head, does it again to get a better grip, and when the fingers leave a sallow imprint on the forehead, visible in the picture, isn’t that proof that the blood has stopped flowing and Pearl is already dead when he is being decapitated? Another hypothesis: Was Pearl drugged? Has he, like Bataille’s ecstatic Chinese youth, been injected with a dose of opium before being decapitated? Or should we believe the testimony of the man who led investigators to Pearl’s grave, Fazal Karim, when he says: “We had a problem with the camera. We noticed at the last minute that the cassette had jammed. We had to start all over again. We were