Author: Jeff Sallot
Publication: The Globe and Mail
Date: September 27, 2003
URL: http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030927/UPAKK//?query==Pakistan
The parents of slain American journalist
Daniel Pearl were angered yesterday by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's
suggestion that their son died because he was getting too close to Islamic
extremists.
Instead of blaming the victim, the
family said, General Musharraf needs to answer some tough questions about
possible links between the killers and Islamabad's intelligence agency.
During a special session yesterday
of the Commons foreign affairs committee, the Pakistani leader, who was
in Ottawa for an official visit to Canada, was asked about The Wall Street
Journal reporter's slaying.
Mr. Pearl, who was the U.S. paper's
bureau chief in Bombay, was investigating Muslim extremists in Karachi,
Pakistan, when he was kidnapped in January of 2002. After days of ransom
demands and weeks of uncertainty, a grisly video of his execution was released.
The journalist's death was a very
sad case, said Gen. Musharraf, who is also Pakistan's army chief -- but
it came about because Mr. Pearl fell in with groups that had dangerous
connections.
"He kept moving down inside into
this world of extremism himself. And, unfortunately, then, whatever happened
happened," he said.
Reached at their home in California
yesterday, Mr. Pearl's parents denounced the suggestion that their son
somehow shared responsibility for his own death.
Judea Pearl said Gen. Musharraf
was obviously "trying to exonerate himself and the people he works with,
the ISI," a reference to Pakistan's main espionage agency, Inter-Services
Intelligence.
Ruth Pearl said Gen. Musharraf seemed
to be "blaming the victim" for what happened, when her son was simply doing
his job as a journalist. Four militants were tried and convicted in the
case, although they have appealed.
French author Bernard-Henri Lévy
has asserted in a new book that Mr. Pearl was killed because he was about
to report that Pakistani authorities maintained close links with al-Qaeda
terrorists.
The Lévy book raises "major
questions that the [Musharraf] government has never responded to," Mrs.
Pearl said.
Although it is not unprecedented
for a visiting head of state to appear before a parliamentary committee,
it is unusual. Gen. Musharraf spent much of his two-day visit to Ottawa
holding public events and giving interviews to counter what he said is
a widespread misperception that his government is soft on Taliban and al-Qaeda
terrorists operating in the Pakistani-Afghan border region.
Montreal Liberal MP Irwin Cotler
raised the Lévy allegations with Gen. Musharraf during yesterday's
committee hearings. Gen. Musharraf responded that the Lévy book
does not present any concrete evidence to back up the allegations of an
ISI-extremist conspiracy.
