The truth will now never be known. Somebody in the Pakistani military-intelligence-police establishment did not want the truth to be known. Why? Who was Farooqi? What were his links with the Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and others in Pakistan? To which organisation he belonged? Let's try to find out.
I
n April,1992, the coalition of Afghan Mujahideen groups, taking advantage of the revolt of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek Commander, against Najibullah, the then President of Afghanistan, managed to invade and capture Kabul. Najibullah, who was overthrown from power, was taken by the United Nations into its protective custody and kept in its office in Kabul. The efforts of the UN to persuade the Mujahideen to allow Najibullah to go to India, where his family was living, failed.
The Mujahideen's success in capturing power was made possible by the assistance of a large number of jihadis from the Pakistani madrasas, who had been trained and armed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and sent into Afghanistan to help the Mujahideen. The Pakistani contingents, which participated in the invasion of Kabul, belonged to the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) was then known, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Amjad Farooqi, then an 18-year-old youth, entered Kabul as a member of the contingent of the SSP.
In 1994, there was a serious failure of the Pakistani cotton crop, which threatened to bring its textile industry to a standstill. Asif Zardari, the husband of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, flew into Turkmenistan and entered into a contract for the purchase of a large quantity of cotton. The Turkmenistan authorities wanted to send the cotton to Iran and from there ship it to Karachi.
Zardari did not agree to it. Instead, he asked them to send the cotton by road via Afghanistan. He had the contract for the road transport of the cotton awarded to a Pakistani crony of his based in Hong Kong. The first two cotton convoys from Turkmenistan were looted by Mujahideen groups operating in the Herat area of Afghanistan.
Zardari thereupon sent Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah Babbar, Benazir Bhutto's Interior Minister, and Pervez Musharraf to Afghanistan to provide protection to the cotton convoys. They asked Mulla Mohammad Omar, who subsequently became the Amir of the Taliban, to collect a large number of students (Talibs) from the madrasas of Pakistan and constitute them into a force for the protection of the cotton convoys. Thus, was the Taliban born.
Babbar and Musharraf, who had heard of the exploits of Amjad Farooqi in Kabul in 1992, asked him to help Mulla Omar in organising this convoy protection force. He did so. Babbar himself travelled with the first convoy after this arrangement came into force and Amjad Farooqi and his boys escorted it.
A few months later, Mulla Omar deputed Amjad Farooqi to raid Herat and capture it with the help of his boys. He did so without difficulty, to the pleasant surprise of many, including the ISI. Thus, from a cotton convoy protection force, the Taliban became the ruler of Kandahar and Herat and other areas. Assisted by Amjad Farooqi and his associates, it started gradually extending its administrative control to other areas.
In the beginning of 1995, Amjad Farooqi left the SSP and joined the HUA. The HUA sent him along with some others into India's Jammu & Kashmir, where they, under the name Al Faran, kidnapped a group of Western tourists. One of the tourists was beheaded and another managed to escape. The fate of the remaining is not known till today. They are believed to have been beheaded and buried, but this has not been confirmed.
In October,1995, Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) under Benazir Bhutto, discovered a plot by a group of Army officers headed by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi to have him and Benazir assassinated, capture power and proclaim the formation of an Islamic Caliphate in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abbasi and his associates in the Army were arrested. They were found to have been plotting in tandem with a group in the HUA led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Abbasi, his associates and the Qari were arrested during the investigation. While Abbasi and his associates were court-martialled and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, the Qari was released without any action being taken against him.
Before 1990, there were two jihadi organisations called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI). The HUM was headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil and the HUJI by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Around 1990, the two merged to form the HUA, with Maulana Khalil as the Amir and Qari Akhtar as the Deputy Amir. Amjad Farooqi used to work closely with the Qari.
In the late 1980s, Abbasi as a Brigadier was posted in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi as the head of the ISI station in India. The Government of India had him expelled. On his return to Pakistan, he was posted to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan). In the beginning of the 1990s, without the clearance of the late Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS under Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister, Abbasi organised a raid on an Indian Army post in the Siachen area and was beaten back by the Indian Army with heavy casualties.Janjua had him transferred out and censured. Since then, he had been nursing an anger against the Pakistan Army's senior leadership and hobnobbing with the Qari. A few months after capturing power on October 12,1999, Musharraf had Abbasi released from jail. He formed an anti-US organisation called Hizbollah, which acted in tandem with the HUJI.
In September,1996, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and Kabul. A large number of jihadi students from the Pakistani madrasas joined the Taliban unit which invaded and captured Kabul. Amjad Farooqi joined the unit at the head of a contingent of the HUA. After capturing Kabul, Amjad Farooqi and his boys raided the UN office, where Najibullah was living, lynched him and hung him from a lamp-post.
When the Taliban, with the help of the madrasa students from Pakistan, captured Jalalabad, Osama bin Laden was living there. He had been permitted by the Burhanuddin Rabbani Government, which was in power in Kabul till September,1996,to enter Afghanistan and take up residence in Jalalabad. It had taken the clearance of the Benazir Bhutto Government to do so. After capturing Jalalabad, the Taliban had bin Laden shifted to Kandahar by Amjad Farooqi and his men.
In October,1997, after establishing the involvement of the HUA in the 1995 kidnapping, the US State Department designated it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under a 1996 US law. The HUA thereupon dissolved itself and the pre-1990 HUM and HUJI resumed their original existence under their previous names. Qari Saifullah Akhtar took over as the Amir of the HUJI and made Amjad Farooqi his deputy.
In February 1998, Osama bin Laden announced the formation of his International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Among those who joined it at its inception were the HUM and a Bangladesh branch of the HUJI, identified as HUJI ( B ). The Pakistani branch of the HUJI, the LET and the SSP joined it in 1999. Amjad Farooqi used to represent the Qari at the meetings of the shoora (consultative council )of the IIF.
In December 1999, a group of Pakistani hijackers, said to be belonging to the HUM, hijacked an aircraft of the Indian Airlines, which had taken off from Kathmandu, and forced the pilot to fly it to Kandahar. They demanded, inter alia, the release of Omar Sheikh, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani Punjabi belonging to the HUM. The Government of India conceded their demands in order to terminate the hijacking.
Amongst the hijackers was a Pakistani Punjabi by name Mansur Hasnain. Sections of the Pakistani media reported that this hijacker was none other than Amjad Farooqi. After their release from detention by the Indian authorities, Maulana Azhar and Omar Sheikh went to Pakistan. The return of Azhar led to a split in the HUM. Azhar and his followers formed a new organisation called the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which joined bin Laden's IIF. The formation of the JEM was blessed by the late Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, of the Binori madrasa, Karachi, who used to be looked upon as the mentor of bin Laden, Mulla Omar and the Pakistani jihadi leaders.
Omar Sheikh took up residence in Lahore and was made in charge of an office run by Al Qaeda in that city. Among other tasks, he was made responsible by bin Laden to procure medicines and other humanitarian relief for the jihadis of the IIF. Azhar and Omar Sheikh, who were working for the ISI before their arrest in India, resumed their contacts with the ISI. Omar Sheikh used to visit Kandahar periodically to meet bin Laden. During one of those visits, he claimed to have come to know of Al Qaeda's plans for the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US and passed on the information to Lt.Gen.Ehsanul Haq, the present Director-General of the ISI, who was then posted as the Corps Commander in Peshawar,
When the USA launched its military operations in Afghanistan in October,2001, the Pakistani components of the IIF called upon their members to proceed to Afghanistan to join in the jihad against the US. Over 30,000 Pakistani volunteers were estimated to have gone into Afghanistan. The largest number of them belonged to the HUJI and were led by Amjad Farooqi. The US air strikes inflicted heavy casualties on them and the survivors, including Amjad Farooqi, fled back into Pakistan. Farooqi took up residence in the Binori madrasa of Karachi where he was sheltered by the late Mufti Shamzai. From his sanctuary in the madrasa, he established contact with Omar Sheikh, who was living in Lahore, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), who was living in Karachi along with Ramzi Binalshibh.
On January 12,2002, under pressure from the US in the wake of the attempted terrorist strike on the Indian Parliament at New Delhi in December,2001, Musharraf announced a ban on the LET, the JEM and the SSP and had their leaders arrested or placed under house-arrest. The whole thing was a farce as was seen subsequently. Intriguingly, he did not ban the HUM and the HUJI, which had many supporters in the Army and did not take any action against Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Amjad Farooqi.
In January,2002, Daniel Pearl, the correspondent of the USA's
Wall Street Journal in Mumbai in India, along with his wife Marianne went to Karachi to enquire into the Pakistani links of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. They reportedly stayed at Karachi in the house of an American free-lance journalist of sub-continental origin, who had worked for some time as a free-lancer for the WSJ, where she had come to know Pearl and Marianne. She had gone to Karachi in connection with a book she was writing on the sub-continent.
Before going to Karachi, Pearl had contacted many people in Pakistan and the USA in order to get introductions to knowledgeable people in Karachi and elsewhere who might be knowing about the local contacts of Reid. It was alleged that among those whose help he sought were James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Mansoor Ijaz, an American lobbyist of Pakistani origin, who often used to write articles for the US media jointly with Woolsey.
Pearl was particularly keen to meet Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, leader of the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), a terrorist organisation based in the USA and the Caribbean with a large following among Afro-Americans. Two of Gilani's four wives are stated to be Afro-Americans. Pearl wanted to talk to him about Richard Reid, since he had reportedly heard that Reid was a member of the JUF and had been trained in a HUM camp in Pakistan in the 1990s.
Even before coming to Karachi, Pearl was reportedly in e-mail contact with one Khalid Khwaja, a retired officer of the Pakistani Air Force who had served in the ISI in the late 1980s and one Mohammad Bashir, who later turned out to be none other than Omar Sheikh. It was alleged that Mansoor Ijaz had given Pearl an introduction to Khwaja. It is not known how he came to know of Bashir. According to the Karachi Police, Pearl was keen to meet Gilani and Omar Sheikh. Bashir promised to help him.
On January 23, 2002, Pearl went by a taxi driven by one Nasir to the Metropole Hotel of Katrachi. He asked the taxi to stop near the hotel and got out of it. He then went to a car parked nearby in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out, introduced himself and invited Pearl to get in. He willingly did so. The car then went away from there. Subsequently, after the arrest of Omar Sheikh, Nasir identified him as the man who got out of the parked car and invited Pearl to get in. The driver testified during the trial of Omar Sheikh that from the willing manner in which Pearl got in it was apparent that he did not suspect a trap.
Subsequently, e-mail messages announcing the kidnapping of Pearl with his photographs started arriving in newspaper offices in Karachi. The Pakistani authorities launched a drive for the recovery of Pearl. There was no success. They started searching for Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under an assumed name, had laid the trap for Pearl.