It was around 8:30 or 9 pm on the last day of 1999. I was in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, and was going to meet a fellow Bihari friend Tabish Khair, now a famous novelist and poet – to celebrate the New Year. Celebrations of the year. While waiting for the others to get ready, I turned on the TV to get an update on IC 814, an Indian Airlines plane hijacked eight days ago with 155 passengers on board. The news was that the horror story was over, and that all the passengers had been released. But of course, in return for the release of the three terrorists, their freedom was obtained.

Two of them who were released from jail were famous in India – Maulana Masood Azhar (founder of terrorist organization Jaish-e-Mohammed) and Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar (Umar Mujahideen). But few people, apart from the police and intelligence agencies, had heard of the third man: Umar Saeed Sheikh. Just two years later, the sheik would become infamous worldwide for kidnapping and beheading an American journalist. It also created a diplomatic crisis between India and Pakistan after the 26 November terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008.

Abduction of 3 Westerners

The Netflix web series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack has sparked a controversy over the names and portrayal of some of the hijackers. But this has led me to my chance meeting with Sheikh.

The year was 1994. My cameraman and I had gone to cover a story for a TV channel in Delhi. It was going through dry runs before the launch. We had barely reached Ghaziabad when we witnessed elaborate security arrangements outside a private hospital. The road was cordoned off. We were told that a terrorist was admitted to hospital last night after being injured in a police encounter in Saharanpur, during which a police inspector was shot.

Security was tightened inside the hospital. But some smooth talk with a friend ‘Darugaji’ from Uttar Pradesh did the trick. He allowed us in on the condition that we brief him on our conversation with the man inside, Omar Shaikh, whose English accent, he admitted, he did not understand. We pan the camera as we enter the room, not knowing who the Sheikh is and what a big catch he is for the police. The only information we had was that the injured man had kidnapped three Britons and an American in Delhi and hid them in a house in Saharanpur on his way to Kashmir. He had told his captors that his name was Rohit Sharma and that he was taking them to his native village in Kashmir. But when a patrolling party of Saharanpur police stumbled upon the prisoners, there was an exchange of fire. A police inspector was killed and Sheikh was injured. However, all the captives were released.

Omar Sheikh, London-born, LSE-educated terrorist

The hospital was posh, Sheikh’s room was big and clean. He lay down on the bed with a bandage on his right shoulder. The camera was rolling as we came face to face with a young man with a long beard, slumped against hospital pillows, looking shocked and distraught. His first reaction was to bombard us with questions, “Who are you, why are you here, who sent you?”.

We asked for an interview, but he refused to talk to us in protest because he said he had no prior knowledge that we were going to interview him. When I presented my press ID card, he stopped. Before the interview started, he told us his name and his age of 20. He was a student of the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE). He also said that he was born in London and brought up both there and in Lahore. His Pakistani immigrant parents lived in London, where they ran a clothing business.

During the half-hour interview, Sheikh Umar looked extremely worried. He told me he would give anything to return to life in Britain. He also kept pleading with me that brother please take me out of here. During the interview, he revealed how, at the age of 18, he had waged ‘jihad’ in Bosnia, fighting alongside and on behalf of Bosnian Muslims, who he said had been killed by Serbs. what is being done He was surprisingly young and had a distinctly British accent. I thought he had the gift of gab. I am not surprised that he managed to attract foreign tourists and later used the same tactic to imprison American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Fooled by extremists.

He also told how he was recruited on campus by an Islamic organization that wanted to establish an Islamic society in Britain. He said that he was fooled by the hard stories he heard about the plight of Muslims and Kashmiris in India.

Sheikh admitted that he was accused of kidnapping some foreign tourists in exchange for Maulana Masood Azhar, who was then in an Indian jail. He also admitted that he had stayed in Delhi for more than a month before the abduction and had seen religious freedom which impressed him. He said that I was told that Muslims do not have any religious rights in India and that Kashmiri Muslims are being tortured and raped by the Hindu army.

I asked him if he was released, would he go back and tell people in Britain that Indian Muslims are free to build mosques, pray and work in government offices? He said he would. He appeared to repent, but clearly not enough.

Meeting with Masood Azhar

It was difficult to say why Omar Sheikh chose the path of destruction. He became a victim of Islamic extremism at a young age. But that doesn’t fully explain the path he chose early in life. He was privileged. He went to the private Forest School in London – the same school former cricketer Nasir Hussain attended, but when Sheikh became a terrorist, Hussain became the captain of the England cricket team.

At the LSE, Sheikh was known for his academic ability, particularly in mathematics and economics. But he left before completing his degree to join the ‘Jihad’ in Bosnia. It is said that there he met some Pakistani “warriors”, who introduced him to Maulana Masood Azhar on his return to Pakistan. He trained in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

After his release, it is not clear where Sheikh went in Pakistan. According to some Pakistani documents, he lived in Lahore, where he married a local woman and had a child.

By this time, Omar Sheikh was mostly known to the Indian investigators and intelligence communities. His name came to light when he was released from Tihar in December 1999, but he remained unknown outside India.

The kidnapping of Daniel Pearl

This changed after the kidnapping of American journalist Daniel Pearl. Suddenly everyone wanted to know who the Sheikh was. A foreign media outlet published my meeting with him, and I was inundated with requests for interviews from Western media.

Sheikh was found guilty of Pearl’s abduction and murder. He was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life imprisonment. According to a respected Pakistani journalist who met an officer at the prison where Sheikh was held, Omar was regularly shuttled between jails in Karachi and Hyderabad, spending a fortnight in each. The officer told the reporter that this was necessary due to the fact that he used his gift of gab and often cast his spell on prison officials, who then did him favors like smuggling cellphones. .

When Sheikh impersonated Pranab Mukherjee.

It’s the gift that once landed officials in hot water and led to a near-diplomatic crisis between India and Pakistan. A year after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, Karachi’s Dawn newspaper ran an investigative story claiming that Sheikh had called then-Pakistani President Asif Zardari and claimed to be an Indian minister. Foreign Pranab Mukherjee. He reportedly used unparliamentary language on the call and threatened Zardari with dire consequences for the Mumbai attacks. The English daily claimed, “Umar Saeed Sheikh, a detained Pakistani militant, betrayed President Asif Ali Zardari and Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani to escalate tensions between India and Pakistan after last year’s terrorist attacks.” had made a call from. on Mumbai, investigators have told Dawn.”

A diplomatic crisis was averted after the call was traced to his cell in Hyderabad jail. The cell was raided, and it was found that Sheikh had used a British SIM card to make the threatening calls.

Despite Daniel Pearl’s wife Maren Pearl writing a book called A Mighty Heart and a Hollywood film of the same title, Omar Sheikh’s story remains a mystery. In dozens of court appearances, he often appeared affable and charming, but many of his terrorist connections have not been confirmed.

Omar Shaikh is still a mystery.

Former dictator Pervez Musharraf called him a British spy in his autobiography. Omar himself boasted of his deep links with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in his off-the-cuff remarks to reporters during the court hearing. He had good relations with Maulana Masood Azhar of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Some journalists investigating the roles of terrorist organizations in the 9/11 attacks claimed he was an al-Qaeda operative.

Umar has been kept in jail despite the Supreme Court’s release order in Pakistan. The country is believed to be holding him in prison after re-arresting him due to international pressure. But some also claim that he is better off in prison, lest he reveal too much.

(Syed Zubair Ahmed is a London-based senior Indian journalist with three decades of experience with Western media)

Disclaimer: These are the personal views of the author.

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