Bahawalpur: A Chilling Echo 23 Yrs Later

I still remember the chill I felt when I first heard of Bahawalpur. It was late January 2002.

- ASRA Q NOMANI

My dear friend and colleague, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, had just left a home I had rented on Zamzama Street in Karachi for an interview from which he never returned. We soon learned terrorists in Pakistan had kidnapped Danny. As we tried to trace Danny's steps, one name kept surfacing: the dusty city of Bahawalpur.

In the days that followed, we learned terrorists had murdered Danny, brutally beheading him and cutting him into pieces. Twenty-three years have passed, but the chain of events that led to Danny's murder continues to haunt us—and it runs straight through Bahawalpur.

This week, India's Operation Sindoor launched an airstrike on Bahawalpur and other terrorist targets, killing terrorist chief Abdul Rauf Azhar. To be clear, Abdul Rauf did not kidnap or murder Danny. But in 1999, he masterminded the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814, which forced India to release three terrorists—including his brother, Masood Azhar, and a British Pakistani, Omar Sheikh, who would go on to lure Danny into captivity. Another brother, Ibrahim Azhar, was a hijacker on Flight 814.