American Recalls His 1994 Abduction

Bela Nuss knows what kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl is going through. He remembers the bite of the chains, the cold metal of a gun at his head, the lifeless eyes of people who would “kill you in a New York minute.”

The 51-year-old legal assistant in San Francisco especially remembers the man who befriended him in a New Delhi restaurant seven years ago, only to betray him. That man is Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, the leading suspect in the abduction of Pearl, the 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who has been missing since Jan. 23.

To Nuss, Sheikh was a friendly stranger who offered to take him to a wedding, then abducted him in an aborted plot to trade Western kidnapping victims for the captors’ jailed allies. Nuss spent 11 days in chains, eating rice and vegetables, his only contact with the outside world a radio tuned to the Voice of America.

“These people are not screwing around,” said Nuss, a low-key man whose love of adventure and the outdoors led him to Pakistan in 1994. “They’re killers.”

Even all these years later, Nuss doesn’t talk about the events easily. He declined to have his picture taken Friday.

“These [terrorists] are not just over there,” he said. “They’re over here now.”

He says he feels for Pearl’s wife, who he imagines is going through the same torment his family suffered during his kidnapping. Pearl was abducted while exploring possible links between Pakistani militants and Richard C. Reid, who was arrested on a Paris-to-Miami flight in December while allegedly trying to light explosives in his shoes.

“I would love to be of any assistance I could, if she wants to talk,” Nuss said.

Nuss went to India from Japan, where he had been teaching. A self-described wanderer, he decided to travel around the Asian subcontinent before returning to the United States. He wanted to see the Himalayas and wanted even more to understand the daily routines of life outside the United States.

He’d been traveling around India for five months when a man he now says was Sheikh sat down beside him in a restaurant and struck up a conversation. The man was friendly. Nuss was eager to learn.

Sheikh invited his new friend to a wedding dinner. They met outside Nuss’ hotel. But instead of going to nuptial festivities, Nuss was bundled into a car and driven to a grimy industrial area outside New Delhi called Ghaziabad.

Seizing Nuss was only one part of the abductors’ plan. In the weeks before his kidnapping, three British backpackers were also taken hostage. They were kept apart from Nuss in a house 100 miles north of New Delhi.

Nuss said he rarely saw Sheikh during his 11-day ordeal. He was guarded by four others. Some of the guards treated him well, seeing to his needs, but “their intention was to off us,” Nuss said. “I could see it in their faces.”

Midway through his capture, he snapped, yanking at his chains and screaming, “I don’t want to be here!”

After that, his minders stopped telling him that he’d be released soon and said they’d keep him as long as they wanted.

Nuss stopped eating. And then, several days later, his rescue was accomplished--”by pure luck,” he says now. Indian police investigating crime in the area broke into the house and found Nuss on a mattress, in chains. One of the kidnappers directed police to the whereabouts of the Britons, who also were freed without injury.

After his ordeal, Nuss entered therapy.

“I don’t feel like it’s left any nasty residues,” he said of the kidnapping. It wasn’t the first time he had faced death. He nearly drowned once on a river rafting trip.

But the experience did temper him.

“I’ve taken a more philosophical, inward path,” he said. “I’m very Earth-oriented. I try to live a conscious life.”