Danny Pearl's Final Victory

From "A Mighty Heart" by Mariane Pearl. Copyright 2002 by Mariane Pearl. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., N.Y.

Danny tried to escape.

I will learn in the coming months that the kidnappers held him in an isolated shack at a compound on the northern outskirts of Karachi, far from a road, far from people passing by. While unshackled to use the toilet, he tried to escape by shimmying through a vent. When he was caught and brought back, he was chained to the engine of a car, too heavy to drag. Another time he tried to break loose when walking with his captors in the compound. Once he heard a vendor going door-to-door selling vegetables, so he shouted for help; they hushed him up, either threatening him with a gun or covering his mouth with their hands. When he became suspicious that his food might be drugged, he didn't eat for two days. It was only after one of the guards sampled a sandwich brought to Danny that he agreed to eat.

Sometimes when I think about how scared Danny must have been, I become physically ill. But they didn't torture him. They didn't beat him badly. They fed him, though not a lot. His meals were brought to him by Naeem Bukhari, the go-between of the two cells-Omar's cell and the cell that held Danny captive. Naeem has been a powerful force in Karachi. Leader of the local branch of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Naeem was being sought by the police even before Danny's kidnapping. He was wanted for the murders of dozens of Shiite Muslims. Naeem was with Omar at the Karachi airport on January 21, and one of the men who met with Omar under the Baloch Bridge on the following day. The day after that, on January 23, when Danny got into the car at the Hotel Metropole, it was Naeem, astride his motorcycle, who led the way to this merciless compound.

The men guarding Danny poke very limited English. He couldn't communicate with them or they with him. I suppose that's why they didn't notice what he was doing with his fingers when they took Polaroids of him-flashing a victory sign to us with one hand, shooting the bird to them with the other. And they couldn't control the spirit and defiance he showed in his face.

To the end, he fought back. In the video, my friends tell me, Danny says, "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish." Yes, I'm sure they made him say that, just as they made him denounce American foreign policy and even perhaps include the fact that his father comes from a family of Zionists. The family did, after all, move to Israel in 1924.

But here is how I know Danny was undefeated to the end: He says on the video, "In the town of Benei Beraq in Israel there's a street called Chaim Pearl Street, which is named after my great-grandfather, who was one of the founders of the town."

Continued on page 2: »