Who Killed Daniel Pearl Read Online Free PDF

halfway done and the head was almost completely severed. We had to put the knife back into the cut and redo the whole scene.”
    But here’s the first mystery.
    Here is the thing I’ve been thinking about since I found those two photos.
    Pearl, when they were taken, is confident.
    There must have been a particularly difficult moment the day before, when the first series of photos were taken. Surely he must have smelled, at least on arrival, the odor of catastrophe. But my feeling is that, on that day when these last two photos were taken, everything had more or less fallen into place: He doesn’t believe he’s going to be killed. It’s as if the idea hasn’t even occurred to him. He’s looking at his executioners—but he’s looking at them as if he were fascinated rather than troubled by what is happening to him.
    Is he naïve?
    Does he live—as do most of the journalists I know and as I do whenever I take on this occupation—with a magical belief that he is intrinsically invulnerable?
    Did the killers reassure him, and have they themselves at that point decided to let him live?
    Is it the same kind of moment of “disquiet, uncertainty and indecision” noted by Leonardo Sciascia in his description of the long ordeal of Aldo Moro, kidnapped and murdered by those 1970s fundamentalists, the Italian Red Brigades?
    In all situations of this kind, does there invariably come a moment— and is it the reason for what we see in the pictures—of vagueness and perhaps compassion, which in Moro’s case occurred on 15 April 1978, when the Brigade sent their famous “Communiqué Number 6,” declaring, “The time has come to make a choice”?
    Had the kidnappers reassured Pearl? Did they tell him, “Don’t worry, you are our guest, the negotiations are going on”? Did they give him books, a Koran, a chessboard, cards?
    Contrary to what the Western press has written, I believe that the execution and its videotaping were not necessarily planned, and may have become imperative at a particular point during his captivity, for reasons we do not know.
    My theory is that for the time being, between Pearl and his killers, between the great journalist—liberal, tolerant, open to the cultures of the world and a friend to Islam—and the jihadists, a relationship has formed of trust, of near complicity, and understanding.
    I am convinced that what happened was the same kind of phenomenon that Sciascia noted (I see, in fact, that Pearl in these photos has something of the same look that Moro had in the famous photo sent to the newspaper La Repubblica on 20 April, in which he too held up the previous day’s paper)—“the daily familiarity which inevitably sets in” within the depths of the “people’s prison,” the “exchange of words,” the “common partaking of food,” this symbolic sharing. The game involving “the prisoner’s sleep” and “the guard’s watch,” the care they must take of the “health” of the man they have “condemned to death.” These “trivial gestures,” these “words” that they “inadvertently” say to each other, but that “emanate from the most profound movements of the soul.” The “eyes that meet at the most vulnerable moments,” the “unexpected exchange of spontaneous smiles”—all of these opportunities, day after day, “for jailer and prisoner, victim and executioner, to fraternize.”
    Knowing him to be a relentless journalist, I’m ready to wager that he takes advantage of these few days to talk, make jokes, and, one thing leading to another, to finally ask the questions that have been on the tip of his tongue for weeks.
    To be precise, let’s say that there was the shock of the first day, his mind reeling, an instant of panic. But I’m sure the situation developed