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Did CIA hand over Pearl murder
suspect to be tortured nearly to death?
Nick Juliano
Raw
Story
Monday November 12, 2007
An alleged terrorist financier who authorities suspected in
the plot to kill journalist Daniel Pearl five years ago was detained
and interrogated by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence before
his death earlier this year, leading human rights groups to suspect
the detainee was tortured nearly to death.
The report in Monday's Wall Street Journal has renewed questions
among legal and human rights advocates over how far US interrogators
will go to get information from detainees and whether the CIA
turns over detainees to other governments that would torture them.
The suspect, Saud Memon, was held for an indeterminate amount
of time and interrogated by US and Pakistani intelligence agencies,
law enforcement sources tell the Journal's Jay Solomon and Steve
Levine.
Memon was dumped in front of his home in Karachi on April 28;
the 44-year-old suspect weighed less than 80 pounds and was badly
injured, family members and human-rights activists said. He was
bound to a wheelchair during an appearance before the Pakistani
Supreme Court five days later, and Memon was dead within three
weeks from what doctors said were complications from meningitis
and tuberculosis.
(Article continues below)
"Legal-aid and human-rights groups have accused Pakistan's
intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence bureau, of
torturing Memon during his detention in Pakistan, based on interviews
with fellow prisoners. A Pakistani police official said Memon
was already in poor condition when the U.S. authorities delivered
him to Pakistan," Solomon and Levine report.
A CIA spokesman told the paper that the agency "does not,
as a rule, comment on allegations regarding who has, or has not,
been in its custody," but he insisted the US "does not
conduct or condone torture."
Pearl, a foreign correspondent for the Journal, was executed
in January 2002 in a brutal videotaped beheading intelligence
agencies believe was orchestrated by militant Pakistani terrorists.
"Pakistani investigators called Memon a prime suspect in
the case because he owned a nursery compound where the journalist
was held and killed. Witnesses alleged Memon himself drove three
men to the compound who subsequently killed Pearl, Pakistani investigators
say," Solomon and Levine report.
Officials said Memon was a significant player among militant
groups believed to be conducting abductions in Pakistan.
For months after Pearl's abduction and execution, Memon disappeared.
Investigators believe he used a fake passport to flee Pakistan
for Mozambique, where he traveled to South Africa. US authorities
eventually learned of his whereabouts from the Pakistani government,
which intercepted a phone call from Memon to family members.
Amina Masood, a human rights activist, told Solomon and Levine
that former inmates imprisoned with Memon said he was extensively
tortured by Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency.
"I saw him with my own eyes. His body looked like a 16-year-old
boy's. He had completely lost his memory," Masood told the
paper. "It wasn't possible for him to survive. He couldn't
recognize his wife, children."
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