Also see below:     
Guantanamo: A Highly Suspect Suicide    [

    Who Really Killed Daniel Pearl?
    By Bernard-Henri Lévy
    Le Point

    Thursday 22 March 2007

    Was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, arrested in Pakistan in February 2003 and once al-Qaeda's No. 3, really Daniel Pearl's murderer? Was it he who, as he confessed to Guantanamo investigators, killed the Wall Street Journal reporter with his own hands? I had mentioned that theory - which was already circulating at the time in certain jihadi circles in Karachi - in the last pages of my book investigation. But a certain number of factors - beginning with the report of Fazal Karim, the man who held Pearl's head while his throat was being cut, and consequently one of the more trustworthy eyewitnesses to the event - led me after further examination to exclude that hypothesis. I have not changed my opinion. And that's not because I know - and there also, I've been able to see a bit - the conditions under which his interrogation at Guantanamo took place that I will modify my conclusion. Mohammed was incontestably one of the senior officials in Bin Laden's criminal army. He was the one, without any doubt, who, in Manila, invented the suicide airplane strategy that had the impact on the World Trade Center ten years later we all know about. And the strange personality that he then was, this man at once flamboyant and demonic, a lover of the good life, girls, great hotels, and, at the same time, fanatically Islamist, was capable, I believe, of the most barbarous acts. And yet ... Whatever the Americans' desire to file away the affair, to turn the page, and, above all, to have the feeling that justice has been done; I myself am persuaded, alas! that Daniel Pearl's murderer, the real one, has still not been identified.

    Go to Original

    Guantanamo: A Highly Suspect Suicide
    By Ian Hamel
    Le Point

    Thursday 08 March 2007

    Yemenite Guantanamo prisoner Ahmed Ali Abdullah supposedly committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell June 10, 2006 at the same time as two Saudi detainees. That being the case, why was the body handed over to his family missing "organs in the region of the pharynx, the larynx and the trachea that are the most important to examine in cases of hanging?" wonders Professor Patrice Mangin of Lausanne's University Institute of Legal Medicine, who was authorized by Alkarama for Human Rights, a Geneva-based NGO, to examine the issue.

    The researcher, who effected an autopsy eleven days after the death, did conclude that asphyxiation was the cause of death, so the suicide theory is possible. However, it is not the only possibility. The victim presented lesions of the teeth and mouth as well as bruises on the back of the right hand that "could be consistent with punctures to the veins." In spite of requests to the American Army's medical authorities, Patrice Mangin has never been able to obtain the report from the first autopsy.