Pearl’s Contact Now a Kidnap Suspect

He was one of the first sources for abducted Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and his rhetoric of wounded pride echoes the Pearl kidnap notes.

But Khalid Khawaja, an aging former Pakistani intelligence official who counts himself a close friend and confidant of Osama bin Laden, is nonetheless perplexed at a growing focus on him as a potential suspect in the kidnapping.

On Wednesday, a top Pakistani government official told The Times that investigators still consider Khawaja a suspect. A day earlier, authorities arrested Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was believed to be a key player in the kidnapping, but that failed to bring about Pearl’s release.

Now some investigators appear to be leaning toward the theory that Sheikh was just one operative, and perhaps not even the most important one, in a sophisticated scheme.

“We’re working on that,” the official said of the case against Khawaja.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said after meeting with President Bush in Washington on Wednesday that he was “reasonably sure” that Pearl was still alive and that “we are as close as possible to getting him released.” He did not elaborate.

He characterized the kidnapping as “fallout” from his crackdown on extremism, but he said he would not be deterred.

Khawaja, a media-savvy small-business man who does research and development for the Pakistani navy, said he is mystified by the focus on him. “They have tried to implicate me with that, but I am open, I am honest, and I am not scared,” he said.

Implicating Khawaja would satisfy those who have divined the secret hand of Pakistan’s murky Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or some rogue element of it, in the Pearl case. The supposed motivation: to display their power despite Musharraf’s crackdown on extremist groups the ISI once aided.

Khawaja was forced out of the ISI and retired from the Pakistani air force in 1988 for challenging former President Zia ul-Haq over his dedication to Islamic causes. He said he worked on the agency’s Afghan operations in the late 1980s, when the U.S. government funneled millions of dollars through the agency to moujahedeen groups battling the Soviet invasion and proxy government in Afghanistan.

Khawaja said he has maintained close contacts with Taliban members and claims that he served as a back-channel link to them between the Sept. 11 attacks and the onset of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan in early October. He showed e-mails that he said prove his case.

But Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief, dismisses the possibility that Khawaja or intelligence agents were involved in the Pearl kidnapping. “Pakistan, ISI and the moujahedeen groups cannot benefit from this kind of a thing,” he said. “I think ISI is being targeted by the Western media.”

In the days after Pearl disappeared Jan. 23, investigators twice came to the doorstep of Khawaja’s spacious house on the capital’s west side.

Last week they arrived in the predawn hours, but Khawaja said he had slipped out and that his mother told them to go away. They left without a search, he said.

Khawaja since has been questioned twice but remains free. He has co-written a plea for Pearl’s release that was published by the Los Angeles Times and has said he found Pearl likable. But he is angry that the U.S. media and Pakistani government make so much of the abduction.

“I have all my sympathy for Daniel Pearl,” he said. “But Pakistanis are all human beings too. Daily, every day, you see people killed and kidnapped all the time, and our government never lifts a finger.”

A Prime Source

Two e-mail messages to foreign media, which included photographs of Pearl in captivity, have called for the release of Pakistani prisoners of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and the return of the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, a friend of Khawaja.

The kidnappers’ second e-mail threatened to execute Pearl within 24 hours and gave American journalists three days to leave.

“Look, we took captive only one Amreekan and our government kicked up such a fuss,” it said. “Are not those Pakistanis taken prisoner in Cuba human beings?”

Khawaja, who spoke with The Times just before authorities arrested Sheikh, said he met with Pearl on Jan. 7 or 8 in Islamabad. The Journal’s South Asia bureau chief was eager to set up a meeting with a reclusive Islamic cleric with a large following in the U.S. who may have counted suspected “shoe bomber” Richard C. Reid as a disciple.

It was not the first time Pearl had contacted Khawaja. In September, the reporter called looking for contacts in Karachi, he said. “I gave him two, three or four people in Karachi,” Khawaja said. “He was nice. As a person, I liked him a lot.”

‘He Would Call Me’

None of those contacts, Khawaja insists, are the ones who authorities now believe led Pearl into the hands of kidnappers.

The two kept in telephone and e-mail contact over the weeks before Pearl disappeared, according to Khawaja. “He would call me and confirm things,” Khawaja said. “We became friendly. And then he disappeared.”

Khawaja said he told Pearl he could not arrange a contact with Sheik Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, who heads Jamaat ul-Fuqra (Party of the Poor). Gilani also has helped convert hundreds of mainly African American adherents in the U.S., called the Muslims of America, with chapters in New York, Virginia, Colorado and California.

“I told him at this particular time, it would be hard to meet him,” Khawaja said.

But authorities say Pearl made contact with people he thought were Gilani intermediaries through e-mail notes, which they now believe were signed with fake names used by Sheikh, the British citizen who was arrested Tuesday, to lure him into the kidnapping trap.

In the meantime, Gilani has turned himself in to police. He remains in jail, though no charges have been filed.

“My name is just being given just so they can say they made progress,” Khawaja said. “Everyone knows very well I am not a suspect.”

“It is only a CIA racket,” he told a reporter. “If you disappear after you came to me, they’ll blame it on me.”

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Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Washington contributed to this report.