People would like to believe the opposite: that authorities knew everything and waited because that would confuse things afterward; that they waited to give the people they had come to get time to escape; that they waited because this is Karachi and nobody knows why they waited.
This is what happens in a place where everything has been secret for so long. And it is one of the reasons Karachi is such a great place to hide: Who couldn't hide in a place where everything is hidden?
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed first came here to live and do business a decade ago, assembling money and people for plots that would occur everywhere in the world but here. An early co-conspirator said he first met Mohammed in an Arab neighborhood full of money changers and bucket shops. A man who was captured in another plot had a phone number for Mohammed that was traced to the other end of town, a middle-class preserve of single-family homes of clean modern lines behind pale stucco walls.
The walls, actually, are the one thing many of the neighborhoods have in common. Karachi is a city of walls.
Another address is in the neighborhood where Ramzi Yousef's in-laws lived, a cramped, dense place where the food stalls are full of root vegetables and the women wear the richly embroidered dresses favored by Baluchis. At least 10% of Karachi's 12 million people are from Baluchistan, the next province to the northwest, and there is a constant traffic to and from the rural precincts, and from there to Iran and Afghanistan. It's where Mohammed's people came from.
A man claimed that he met Mohammed and his family across the marsh flats in the mud huts of another neighborhood this past spring. Mohammed was posing as a spiritual advisor, a holy man on the run from Arab agents who didn't like his brand of Islam. The story seemed preposterous, but police acknowledge that they received a tip from another source and searched the same neighborhood extensively.
The part about there being a family turned out to have some basis. The police and the agents and the army all gathered for the big shootout in Defense because of the family. Earlier that day, acting on a tip, the police raided an apartment a couple of miles away. Pakistini authorities say they had information, based on utility records, that a senior Al Qaeda leader might be there. Instead, they found three children, two women and a man.
