ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A middle-aged American construction worker, on a self-proclaimed mission to help American troops, armed himself with a dagger, a pistol, a sword, Christian texts, hashish and night vision goggles and headed to the lawless tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan to hunt down, single-handedly, Osama bin Laden.Pakistani police detained the man on Monday, according to a police official from the border district of Chitral in Pakistan — an area widely rumored to hide Mr. bin Laden. On Tuesday, the man was transferred to Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan’s northwest, a Pakistani security official said. He was identified by several variations of the name Gary Brooks Faulkner; some news reports said he was a construction worker.
Many details of the man’s mission remain a mystery, including the relevance of an intriguing parallel with his quarry: bad kidneys.
On June 12, the heavily bearded Mr. Faulkner checked into the Ishpata Inn in the Bumboret Valley, a picturesque area far from any city and without telephone contact with the rest of the country, the police in Chitral said.
He disappeared a day later, and the police sent out a search party to find him. They tracked him down in the village of Sheikhanandeh. He threatened to kill anyone who got close to him, according to the Chitral police officials.
“He was roaming in the security zone in a suspicious manner,” said the Chitral police chief, Jaffer Khan, according to Reuters. “He had a dagger and night vision goggles with him. He is being investigated.”
American officials were circumspect. A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Islamabad said the American consulate in Peshawar, the regional capital of northwestern Pakistan, was alerted on Tuesday morning that an American citizen had been detained, but that officials had not yet been able see him. The official did not say where the American was being held, and said privacy laws prevented them from identifying him.
Reuters cited Mumtaz Ahmed, a senior police official in Chitral, as saying that Mr. Brooks was hunting Mr. bin Laden because he had suffered personal losses in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. The New York Daily News published an interview with a woman identified as his sister, Deanna Faulkner, who said he had been “extremely religious since his troubled youth,” and that his kidneys were failing.
“I’m guessing that he wanted to do one last thing for his country before he died," she was quoted as saying.
Mr. Ahmed confirmed that the man was carrying medicines for kidney and blood pressure treatment” and told The Associated Press that Mr. Faulkner had a book containing Christian verses and teachings.
But he was also carrying a pistol with forty rounds, a night vision device, a camera, a dagger, a knife and a small quantity of hash, according to a security official who asked not to be identified because he was not allowed to speak publicly on the matter.
The official said that the man told the police that he wanted to go to the Afghan province of Nuristan, just across the border, “to locate bin Laden and kill him.” He also said he wanted to help American forces.
Officials said that the man had made several trips to Pakistan in the last seven years and had been many times to Chitral in the last three. It was unclear what he had done on those trips.
― Elvis Telecom, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 00:10 (fifteen years ago)