US WSJ journo recalls Daniel Pearl’s murder, hails Operation Sindoor in Pak’s Bahawalpur

The current tensions between India and Pakistan have resurfaced many old wounds. Recalling the tragic fate of her colleague Daniel Pearl—a Wall Street Journal journalist who was kidnapped and brutally murdered by Pakistani terrorists—hailed India’s Operation Sindoor.

“Bahawalpur”, she wrote on X, “I still have chills in my heart from when I first heard that town’s name in late January 2002. For the 23 years since, I have reported on how Pakistani intelligence and military leaders have used that city — Bahawalpur — in the southern province of Punjab as a base for their homegrown domestic terrorists.”

She said that India was striking ‘actual hubs’ for Pakistan’s homegrown domestic terrorism. 

She further shares, “My friend, WSJ reporter Danny Pearl, went to Bahawalpur in December 2001 with a notebook and a pen. General Pervez Musharraf had just promised he was shutting down Pakistan’s militant groups after a strike by Pakistan’s terrorists against the Parliament in India, and Danny reported on the militant offices in Bahawalpur.”

Terrorist camps open for business in Bahawalpur

Nomani recalls Pearl’s interview scheduled in Bahawalpur on January 23, 2002.

She got to know that a man named Asif Farooqi had arranged an interview for Pearl through Arif, a PR man for Harkutul Mujahideen, but Pearl wasn’t aware of it. 

“The police launched a manhunt to find Arif in Bahawalpur. We learned Arif’s family faked a funeral for Arif. Police found him trying to board a bus in Muzaffarabad, across the country from Pakistan’s border with Kashmir. Arif had handed Danny off to Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani dropout from the London School of Economics, radicalised in the 1990s in London mosques. He went to Pakistan to train in these militant training camps. Then he kidnapped tourists in India,” she added.

She also noted the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI’s history of providing safe passage and support to terrorist figures such as Omar Sheikh and Jaish-e-Mohammed(Jem) founder Masood Azhar, whose family was allegedly killed in Operation Sindoor in Bahawalpur.

Pakistan: Safe passage for terrorists

Nomani said that Pakistan has had a duty to dismantle those terrorist bases, for even the safety of its people. However, its military and intelligence gave them safe passage.

“You will see parallels in the propaganda messages against India and Israel. Like Hamas, Pakistani terrorists crossed a border to kill. Now, Pakistani propagandists call themselves victims of their “fascist” “coloniser” neighbour,” she wrote.

Did India avenge Daniel Pearl’s death?

During the press briefing on Friday, India Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri drew direct parallels between Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (Jem) and the abduction and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, saying that JeM was ‘directly or indirectly’ responsible for his death.

Who was Daniel Pearl?

After the 9/11 attack in the United States in 2001, Daniel Pearl, the South Asia Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal, travelled to Pakistan in December of the same year to report on terrorist organisations operating in the region. Before this, he had accepted a regional posting in Mumbai and later moved to Pakistan to cover the US-led Global War on Terrorism.