On the day Pearl died, two Pakistani men acting as guards were also present: Ali Khan, arrested several months ago, and Fazal Karim, an employee of Saud Memon.
[10][11][12] According to the Associated Press Memon disappeared four years ago in 2003, and was held in "mysterious detention" and released on 28 April 2007,[13] when he was dumped on a garbage heap in front of his home in Karachi in very poor health and near death[14] by unidentified men.
[21] A review of Bernard-Henri Lévy's book Who killed Daniel Pearl?, published in the Asia Times on 28 June 2003 said:[22] An informant tells BHL "how everything started by the dismantling ... of a cell making fake papers for al-Qaeda clandestines"; and how the investigation led to "a trafficker specialized not only in fake papers but in the export of clandestine workers to Riyadh, 11 or 12-year-old kids selected in Karachi and Dacca to work as jockeys in camel races on the beaches of Dubai and, last but not least, al-Qaeda combatants exported, through the Oman Straits, to the Emirates, Yemen and other Middle East countries".
[citation needed] Human rights groups have said they suspect that Memon and several others were held in secret extrajudicial detention by Pakistani intelligence agents probing Pearl's slaying.
[28] According to Asra Q. Nomani, a longtime colleague of Daniel Pearl's, Pakistani papers reported that Saud Memon had been held in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba.
[1] [4] An article from the 12 November 2007 issue of the Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed senior US counter-terrorism official, who said Memon was:[31][32][33] ...in a lot of the rooms where important things were being discussed.
[34] International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) also noted Memon as one of the missing persons to resurface, as victims of abuse "revealing the existence of centers and places of illegal detention, inhuman and degrading treatment suffered, and confessions extracted under torture.