The three-year-long Pearl Project that Asra Nomani conducted with Georgetown University and that ended in 2010, established that the murder of Pearl involved several Pakistani jihadi organisations, at the centre of which was Omar Saeed Sheikh (himself belonging to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen).
The Pearl Project, in fact, offers a window into the nexus of the Punjabi Taliban with the al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. The Punjabi Taliban consists of an alphabet soup, members of which reincarnate under new names when the international community pressured Pakistan to stamp down on these groups.
Punjabi Taliban like Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), Harkat-ul-Islami (HuI), Hafiz Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) which resurfaced as Jamat-ud-Dawa (JeD), and still later as Falah-e-Insaniyat (FeI), etc., were all midwifed by Pakistan’s military intelligence agencies and remain under its benevolent care, save a sacrifice here…