The Dead Suspect

Saud Memon was a key figure for those who wished to solve a mystery about the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl: Why did the captors turn his abduction into a slaying? But when Memon, a Pakistani jihadi (left) who was central to the case, died earlier this year -- likely of complications related to injuries sustained under U.S. and Pakistani interrogation -- the secret may have gone with him.

The issue is reported in an article I co-authored in today's Wall Street Journal.

Pearl, my Pakistan reporting colleague after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks, was kidnapped in January 2002. But it's not clear that his kidnappers intended to kill him. It appears that they weren't certain what they wanted, but thought they could leverage him for advantage. Meanwhile, they held Pearl at a nursery owned by Memon, the financier of various jihadi activities.

If the conclusions regarding Pearl's initial abduction are true -- I think they are -- all of that changed about a week later, around the end of January or the beginning of February. Memon arrived at the nursery, driving three Arabic-speaking men who proceeded to video-tape Pearl, then kill him.

Why did Memon drive the killers to the compound? What changed in the kidnappers' plans?

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged conceiver of the Sept. 11th attacks, has supposedly confessed to being one of those three Arabic speakers, the one who actually wielded the knife.
But reporters on the story, including me, thought that the answer was best answered by Memon, who had vanished after Pearl's death became known.

In April, Memon turned up in Karachi, dumped in front of his Karachi home, senseless and weighing about 80 pounds. He died three weeks later in a hospital. Reporting showed he had fled to South Africa, where he was picked up by U.S. authorities, held for an unspecified period, then turned over to Pakistan.

The story is worth reading.