City of Reporter’s Kidnap No Stranger to Crime

When Daniel Pearl’s search for the underbelly of international terrorism led him last month to this Arabian Sea port, the Wall Street Journal reporter found himself in one of South Asia’s most volatile cities, where lawlessness and sectarian warfare have become part of life.

“It’s the only city in Pakistan where real, Western-style organized crime thrives,” said Aamer Ahmed Khan, editor of the Herald, Karachi’s liberal monthly magazine. “Criminals are known for what they are, yet still have social respect.”

Large gambling and prostitution rings thrive here. Over the last two decades, Karachi has become a major South Asian transit point for smuggling guns and drugs. Muslim groups war with one another.

Given Pearl’s disappearance last month and the subsequent demands by his apparent captors, it’s ironic that this city of 12 million has made real progress in controlling one major class of crime: kidnappings. The seizure of prominent citizens has fallen from a high of 79 in 1990 to 13 cases last year.

Jameel Yusuf, an important Karachi business leader who has helped spearhead the fight against kidnappings, maintains that the epidemic has been nearly wiped out.

“This wave of crime is finished,” Yusuf said confidently. “There are more kidnappings and cases of extortion in Bombay [India] or New Delhi today than in Karachi.” Still, fear of kidnapping remains real in the city.

Yusuf claimed that most of the kidnapping gangs--who seize people almost exclusively for money rather than politics--have been broken.

“Daniel’s case is very different from the others,” Yusuf said of Pearl. “He sought an appointment with the abductors himself.”

Speaking at a seminar here Monday, a top police official in the region said he believes the kidnapping was not planned. “He wasn’t taken forceably,” said Inspector General Syed Kamel Shah. “He went to see people who then took him.”

Pearl disappeared Jan. 23 as he was investigating links between a Pakistani Islamic militant leader, Sheik Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, and British national Richard C. Reid, who allegedly tried to blow up a transatlantic airliner in December by detonating explosives packed into his shoes.

There was no word Monday on the fate of the 38-year-old journalist. Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, appealed for his release in an open letter to the group that claimed responsibility for the abduction. “I have not heard from you for several days and want to begin a dialogue that will address your concerns and bring about Danny’s safe release,” the letter said.

Pearl’s wife pleaded for his life during an appearance on BBC television, saying she was willing to die in his place. “Don’t harm an innocent man because you’re just going to create one more misery,” said Mariane Pearl, who is six months pregnant with the couple’s first child.

Police investigators have concluded that only the first two of 10 e-mail messages sent in the name of the kidnappers were genuine. The first two electronic messages contained photos of Pearl in captivity. The second of the two threatened to kill him within 24 hours unless the United States met a string of vague and sweeping demands, including the release of Pakistanis captured in Afghanistan and now held by U.S. forces at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At the time he vanished, Pearl was on his way to meet an intermediary, believed to be Bashir Ahmed Shabbir, who reportedly promised to lead him to Gilani. Police are seeking Shabbir.

The falling rate of kidnappings aside, Karachi can still be a dangerous place.

Pakistanis are quick to note that only a small fraction of Karachi’s violence is directed against foreigners, but Americans have been targeted before. In 1997, Islamic militants gunned down four American employees of a Texas oil company and their Pakistani driver. In 1995, two American diplomats were slain when gunmen opened fire on a U.S. Consulate van./

Today, for many of the Americans living in the city, heavy security is just an extension of life’s routine. U.S. diplomats, for example, drive in armor-plated cars and are trailed by a second car carrying armed guards. “Even when they go grocery shopping, that’s the way it is,” one resident said.

American visitors are advised to avoid travel after dark and consider as much as two-thirds of the city as a “no-go” zone. The measures are hardly surprising, given that there are areas where even Pakistani police don’t dare go.

Karachi’s slide into violence and crime in many ways is linked with the decades of turbulence in neighboring Afghanistan. As Pakistan’s largest city and biggest port, Karachi became an important conduit for smuggling weapons to the conflict zone. It also became a training area for the most militant of Muslim recruits heading for the fight.

At the same time, more than 1 million Afghan refugees migrated to the city during the 1980s and ‘90s, many of them linked to the drug trade in their homeland. The hard-line attitudes among some of these refugees also fed into a vicious gangland-style power struggle between Sunni and Shiite Muslims for control of the city’s religious institutions.

Like many here, Yusuf blames Karachi’s troubles on the international community, which, he says, abandoned Pakistan and the region after Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989.

“We were stupidly compassionate people [to take in so many Afghan refugees], and Karachi is paying the price,” Yusuf said. “The world let us down.”

Unlike many here, however, Yusuf decided to do something about the increase in crime.

He founded a nongovernmental organization called the Citizens Police Liaison Committee in 1989 to marshal private sector resources to help law enforcement agencies fight waves of kidnappings. The committee bought computers and other equipment that the police otherwise could not have afforded.

In an interview Monday, Yusuf insisted that the Pearl case does not constitute a resurgence of kidnappings. He and others also note that the apparent kidnapping is different from most snatches here, which are carefully choreographed affairs.

“Police put out feelers through their street informants or even precinct-level politicians to determine who has the victim and that he is safe,” said Khan, the Herald editor. Then they signal it is time to negotiate, often via a brief newspaper article describing the family as “anxious to hear from the kidnappers.”

In time, a sum is paid, the victim is released, and the kidnappers flee. “Karachi kidnappings have been nonviolent and always were about money,” Yusuf said.

In some instances, kidnappers take on a Robin Hood dimension, especially in working-class neighborhoods of a city where the income disparity between rich and poor is vast. There, people have come to view abductions as a kind of gunpoint socialism, with the rich giving to the less affluent kidnappers.

While the people of this violence-prone city have expressed shock at the Pearl case, they are equally appalled by the death threats and the chaotic, often contradictory string of e-mails directed not to the police or the journalist’s family but to Western and Pakistani news media.

“It has the air of a group that’s not quite clear how to do it,” noted Khan, “like the work of a bunch of amateurs.”

Pakistani law enforcement officials, now assisted by the FBI, seem uncertain how to read both the death threats and the kidnappers’ vague demands. In interviews, senior police officials base their cautious optimism about Pearl’s eventual fate at least in part on the assumption that the kidnappers must be after money and therefore want to keep him alive.

Yusuf, who saw the journalist the day before he vanished, said there was another cause for optimism--an electronic relationship Pearl had formed with Bashir Ahmed Shabbir, the alleged intermediary.

“He’d built a rapport in corresponding with Bashir by e-mail,” Yusuf said. “They’d even talk about domestic things, like the fact his [Pearl’s] wife was sick.

“To this man, Daniel was a person who had a wife,” Yusuf added. “That gives me hope he’s still alive.”