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LONDON, Feb 14: As a British-born man confesses to abducting US reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, a traveller once bewitched by Sheikh Omar’s intellect and charm recalls his own close shave with “the reluctant kidnapper”.
British teacher Trevor Matthews believes he was meant to be the first Westerner taken hostage by Sheikh Omar, who is alleged to have snatched four other tourists after drifting from a well-to-do London upbringing into a shadowy world of radicals.
“He came across as a charming young man,” Matthews said in an interview of his 1994 encounter with Sheikh in New Delhi.
“It struck me as though he had a student idealism and took it a stage further than most. Now he’s taken it several stages further,” Matthews said in the interview.
Now 41, Matthews met Sheikh, who was using the Hindu alias Rohit Sharma, while travelling in India in 1994.
He was totally taken in by the affable Asian youth, the son of a clothes merchant from east London who had grown up in the same area of the British capital and had studied at the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE).
Eager to see the “real India” away from the tourist track, Matthews had readily accepted an invitation to visit Sheikh’s uncle’s village north of Delhi.
In a diary he later wrote while in an Indian jail, Sheikh himself recalls meeting Matthews in the backstreets of Delhi and trying to lure him into the trap.
“I made several acquaintances and convinced a British chap called Trevor to come to the village after a few days,” Sheikh wrote in his diary, which recounted his audacious efforts to ensnare Americans, Britons and French.
But a mix-up on the day of their intended departure meant the trip fell through, and Matthews set off to occupied Kashmir on his own, brushing off Sheikh’s agitation.
“He was a little bit huffy,” Matthews said.
CLOSE SHAVE: Matthews thinks he was lucky to got away.
Three other Britons and an American, however, apparently fell for the young man’s charm while in northern India and accepted his invitation to the village.
The Britons — Paul Rideout, Myles Croston and Rhys Partridge — said they had been lured to a remote village by a man they knew as Rohit Sharma who said he was a student at LSE.
After a daring raid by Indian forces in which one kidnapper and two policemen were killed, the hostages were released. Indian police identified Rohit Sharma as Sheikh Omar, who was captured after a fight with a policeman in Delhi.
He spent the next five years in jail for his alleged part in the kidnapping.
Only when he returned to the Indian capital from held Kashmir did Matthews realise the truth about his new “friend” and the possible motive behind his invitation.
“I picked up the post and there were lots of letters from my family back home who were absolutely worried stiff. There were newspaper clippings about the kidnappings and I recognized Sheikh from the photos,” he said.
Sheikh was freed in 1999 in exchange for 155 hostages on an airliner hijacked to Kandahar.
Indian police have since linked him to the Sept 11 attacks in the United States, accusing him of involvement in the transfer of 100,000 dollars to one of the pilots who flew airliners into the World Trade Center.
But even when he learnt of the sinister side to his bespectacled, chess-playing acquaintance, Matthews said he did not think violence ran in his blood.
“He almost came across as a reluctant kidnapper — he seemed genuinely interested in the people he was meant to be kidnapping,” Matthews said.
Flourishing career: Daniel Pearl made his name at the Wall Street Journal writing quirky feature stories, but it was his pursuit of hard news on Muslim radicals that ended in his abduction and possible death.
Hired by the Journal in 1990, Pearl began writing the quirky front-page features known as “A-heads” for which the paper is well-known.
He began his tenure at the paper in its Atlanta bureau and was moved to the Washington office in 1993 to cover transportation.
He was sent to London in 1996 and in 1999 made a weekend visit to Paris where he met his future wife, Mariane.
Pearl became the Journal’s South Asia bureau chief about two years ago, based in Mumbai.
Pearl, 38, was born in Princeton, New Jersey, moved to Los Angeles, California as a youngster, and steadily rose through the ranks as a reporter.
After graduating from elite Stanford University in Palo Alto, California with a degree in communications, Pearl began reporting for The North Adams Transcript, a small-circulation newspaper in the north-eastern state of Massachusetts, in 1985.
He later moved on to the Union News, also in Massachusetts, and then to the Berkshire Eagle, where a series of articles on land use won the young reporter an American Planning Association Award.—Reuters/AFP
