Diary Delves Into Kidnapper’s Odyssey Into ‘Holy War’

The chief suspect in the kidnapping of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl had a flair for writing himself and penned a long, revealing confession after he was jailed for kidnapping an American tourist seven years ago.

Police in Karachi, Pakistan, charged three men Friday in connection with Pearl’s disappearance. They are to appear in court Monday. But Pakistani authorities suspect that it was Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh who lured Pearl into a trap in Karachi on Jan. 23, and it was Sheikh who confessed in writing to the 1994 abduction in India of California tourist Bela Josef Nuss of Walnut Creek and three British backpackers.

While a prisoner in New Delhi’s Tihar jail, where Indian investigators say he forged terrorist links with the Indian mafia, Sheikh wrote a 56-page diary in longhand.

A copy of that journal was obtained Friday from Sheikh’s court file, along with statements from Nuss and Sheikh’s other victims, who described him as threatening at times but friendly at others. Sheikh once offered to bring Nuss books and a journal to record his experiences in captivity, “so that after my release, I would have something to think about,” the ex-hostage told Indian police.

“He said I was their guest and they did not like what they were doing,” Nuss said in a six-page statement on Nov. 8, 1994. “He further told me that they are not terrorists and that they were doing this because the Indian army was doing terrible things in Kashmir.”

Sheikh’s New Delhi lawyer, Vikas Bahwa, said his client’s prison journal was not a legal confession, but he confirmed that Sheikh wrote the document, in which he describes his military training in Afghanistan, and his kidnapping mission in India, in great detail.

“It was a diary, probably, which he was keeping,” the lawyer said. Bahwa added that Sheikh “left in haste” and must have forgotten to take the diary when he was released in December 1999 in return for the release of passengers on a hijacked Indian Airlines flight.

Sheikh’s prison diary is a window into the mind of an intelligent man who grew up amid the privilege of Wanstead, east London, only to drop out of the prestigious London School of Economics to join a Muslim “holy war.”

Sheikh also provides brief biographies of what he calls his “associates,” including assessments of their personality flaws, aliases and other identifying details, as if he had decided to turn informant. Or perhaps he was sketching out a book.

He identified the kidnapping operation’s commander as Shah Saab and named his three aliases, along with three militant groups to which he belonged. Then Sheikh recalled his terrorist boss as “quite moody at times. Very good at controlling people. Very particular about small details.”

Another accomplice, identified as Siddique, was a veteran of the Afghan war against Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Sheikh described him as a muscular man “with black piercing eyes” who wanted to work in a pharmacy but ended up fighting Indian rule in Kashmir instead.

He called Amin “an extra used for errands,” whom Sheikh didn’t like “because he scolded me.”

Nuss, in a statement to police after he was freed in a shootout, said Sheikh had tricked him into getting into a van, where he was abducted at gunpoint on Oct. 20, 1994. Sheikh told Nuss that if he didn’t cooperate “they would not hesitate in blowing my head off.”

Then Sheikh said: “We want to get back at them. They are all the enemy,” according to Nuss’ statement. Nuss said he told Sheikh that he didn’t “know the United States is involved.”

“The United States is involved in everything,” Sheikh replied, and “asked me to be quiet,” Nuss told Indian police.

Nuss’ abductors tied his hands together with nylon string and covered him with a black burka, the long, veiled shroud worn by some Muslim women, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Nuss said that Sheikh, a Muslim, had introduced himself as Rohit Sharma, a Hindu name, when he struck up a conversation as Nuss was eating lunch in a New Delhi guest house on Oct. 18, 1994.

When they met again two days later, about 6 p.m., Sheikh led Nuss to a light blue minivan where two men were waiting. After a 15-minute drive, the van stopped to pick up two men waiting at the roadside. One of them grabbed Nuss tightly by both wrists while the other pointed a gun at him.

Sheikh told Nuss that he would be held for only two days, but the captors chained his right ankle to a steel spike hammered into the concrete floor of their hide-out and brought in a pan and bottle when he had to relieve himself.

Nuss wasn’t freed until Oct. 31, 1994, after 11 days in captivity, when Indian police stormed the hide-out. One of the kidnappers and a police officer were killed.

Sheikh was a top student in an English private school before he studied mathematics and statistics at the London School of Economics in October 1992. The following year, he left for Bosnia-Herzegovina, hoping to join the “Convoy of Mercy” relief effort to aid Bosnian Muslims besieged by Serbian and Croatian forces.

In a two-page resume appended to his prison diary, Sheikh said he got as far as the Croatian city of Split but was too sick to go into Bosnia and chatted with moujahedeen fighters instead.

They “recommend training in Afghanistan first,” Sheikh wrote. He returned to London to study for his exams in May, but he said he couldn’t “settle down,” and the following month he left for Pakistan, the birthplace of his parents.

Sheikh wasn’t on a sentimental journey. He went straight to the Lahore office of the Harkat Moujahedeen and joined the group headed by Fazlur Rehman Khalil, who co-signed Osama bin Laden’s February 1998 fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to attack Americans.

In August 1993, Sheikh traveled to Afghanistan, then fell ill after two weeks there. He left to stay with relatives in Lahore but was back in Afghanistan in September, eager to start his military training.

Sheikh signed up for “Junduba,” which he called “a four-month course given only to those dedicating their lives to jihad”--holy war--and was “introduced to small arms and heavy arms.”

He was in a group of about 20 recruits. Their regular training was interrupted from October to December 1993 when about 40 permanent members of the Harkat Moujahedeen arrived “to introduce new things, such as formations, raid and ambush tactics, rappelling, blasting, intelligence tactics, field-work, survival, etc.,” he wrote.

When Sheikh finished his training at the end of 1993, he asked to go to Bosnia, but one of the militant group’s leaders, Maulana Abdullah, asked if he would go to India instead.

Sheikh said his passport was about to expire, so Abdullah suggested that he stay on at the training camp as an instructor, according to Sheikh’s account. Instead, Sheikh returned to London to help recruit jihad fighters.

By May 1994, Sheikh was back in Afghanistan, and after a quick refresher, became an instructor in the 40-day course on how to handle light and heavy weapons. He called it a “very rewarding experience.”

Abdullah then asked him to go to India to kidnap foreigners in an effort to win the release of jailed terrorists, such as Maulana Masood Azhar, who was then a leader of Khalil’s Harkat Ansar group. Indian police had captured Azhar earlier in 1994.

Sheikh was arrested in India, and his hostages freed, before he could spring Azhar or anyone else. But the two men finally went free in December 1999 in the deal to save passengers on an Indian Airlines flight that had been hijacked to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

By Sheikh’s account, he wasn’t a very skilled kidnapper. At times, his diary makes him sound like an innocent abroad, more naive tourist than international terrorist.

When he arrived in New Delhi on July 26, 1994, on a Pakistan International Airways flight from Lahore, Sheikh asked passersby for a “good hotel” to stay in and settled on the Holiday Inn, which floored him with a bill that “was an astounding $210 a night,” Sheikh wrote.

Sheikh said his orders were to find an American to kidnap, and he was having trouble befriending any American travelers at the regular tourist stops.

So he decided that an American teacher might be a good person to kidnap and went looking for one at the Woodstock School, a boarding school in Mussoorie, in the lush green Himalayan foothills of India’s Uttar Pradesh state.

As always, Sheikh had another motive. He needed to soothe an ego apparently bruised when he left the London School of Economics after his first year in 1993 to make the trip to Bosnia.

Sheikh wrote in his diary that he applied for a job as a teacher at Woodstock “partly because I wanted to see whether cutting short my academic career had greatly affected my competitiveness on the job market. I was interviewed by the vice-principal and I didn’t get offered the job!”

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Sidhartha Barua of The Times’ New Delhi Bureau contributed to this report.