Updated 22 February 2002
Source: Wall Street Journal
Updated February 22, 2002 2:24 p.m. EST
Investigators Have Videotape Confirming
The Murder of Journal Correspondent
By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter
Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent abducted while reporting in Pakistan, died at the hands of his captors.
A videotape obtained by investigators in Pakistan indicated that Mr. Pearl was killed at some point in the four weeks since he was kidnapped. "We are heartbroken at his death," said Peter R. Kann, publisher of the Journal, and Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, in a statement. "Danny was an outstanding colleague, a great reporter, and a dear friend of many at the Journal."
The statement added: "His murder is an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of everything Danny's kidnappers claimed to believe in. They claimed to be Pakistani nationalists, but their actions must surely bring shame to all true Pakistani patriots."
Mr. Pearl disappeared in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi on Jan. 23 after embarking for what he believed was an interview with a prominent figure in the country's Islamic movement. Four days later, a group calling itself "The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty" sent an e-mail, accompanied by pictures of the 38-year-old Mr. Pearl in chains. One of the pictures showed him with a gun to his head.
The group, which was unknown to U.S. officials, sent a second e-mail days later. In their messages, the group called for the release of Pakistani nationals being held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the wake of the military campaign in Afghanistan, as well as Pakistanis being detained in the U.S. as terrorism suspects. It also called for the U.S. to turn over F-16 fighter jets purchased by Pakistan in the late 1980s but never delivered because of U.S. sanctions related to Islamabad's nuclear-weapons program.
A Deadline From Captors
In their second e-mail, the captors threatened to kill Mr. Pearl within 24 hours if the demands weren't met. The U.S. and Pakistani governments undertook an intensive effort to find his captors, which ultimately led to the arrest of the apparent mastermind of the kidnapping -- a British-educated militant named Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh -- but no clear answer about Mr. Pearl's fate until Thursday.
President Bush reacted angrily to the news, saying those who "engage in criminal, barbaric acts need to know that these crimes only hurt their cause." Mr. Bush expressed particular sympathy for Mr. Pearl's pregnant wife, Mariane, saying: "We're especially saddened for his unborn child, who will now know his father only through the memory of others." In a separate statement, the State Department suggested the U.S. will continue to hunt for those who captured and killed Mr. Pearl.
The abduction and death mean the Journal has lost one of its premier foreign correspondents, who was noted for his lively eye for detail and his gift for explaining the human side of complex international problems. Paradoxically, though he appears to have suffered at the hands of Islamic militants angry at the West, he was particularly sensitive to sentiments in the Islamic world and committed to explaining them to his readers in the West.
Ripple Effects
The crime could have consequences that ripple well beyond the Journal. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, on a trip to Washington last week, speculated that the kidnapping may have been carried out by Islamic extremists as an attempt to "destabilize" his government in retaliation for the crackdown he has carried out against militants. Asked why Mr. Pearl was taken in the first place, Mr. Musharraf mused: "Maybe it's my actions of moving against extremism."
If that's the case, Mr. Musharraf may confront more moves by extremists. Some factions in his country are seeking to undercut his decision to support President Bush in his war on terrorism and his campaign to oust the al Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban regime from neighboring Afghanistan.
In fact, in their second e-mail, Mr. Pearl's captors threatened to abduct more U.S. journalists and vaguely threatened other Americans as well. Aware the highly publicized kidnapping could undermine international confidence in Pakistan, Mr. Musharraf's government undertook an aggressive effort to resolve the case -- an effort praised Thursday by the State Department, which said that Islamabad had made "every effort to locate and free Mr. Pearl."
The State Department added: "The murder of Mr. Pearl is an outrage and we condemn it."
For the Journal and Mr. Pearl's family, the abduction was a tragedy of a much more personal dimension. Mr. Pearl was accompanied on his reporting trip to Karachi by Mariane, a French citizen who is expecting the couple's first baby in May. She became a prominent figure around the world in the last three weeks because of her impassioned appeals to her husband's abductors to release him and let him resume his life's work of explaining the world's problems to the Journal's readers. Mr. Pearl is also survived by his parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, of Encino, Calif., and two sisters, Tamara and Michelle.
"Danny's senseless murder lies beyond our comprehension," Mr. Pearl's family said in a statement. "Danny was a beloved son, a brother, an uncle, a husband and a father to a child who will never know him.
"A musician, a writer, a storyteller and a bridge-builder, he was a walking sunshine of truth, humor, friendship and compassion. We grieve with the many who have known him in his life and we weep for a world that must reckon with his death."
In its statement, the Journal said: "This loss is, of course, most painful for Danny's family, in this country and elsewhere. We ask our colleagues in the press to respect their privacy, and to permit them to grieve undisturbed. The Wall Street Journal is a public institution, but the Pearls are private citizens. We hope also that our colleagues, too, will be permitted some time and space to begin the very difficult process of making peace with this profound loss."
But the Journal statement also pledged: "We will, in coming months, find ways, public and private, to celebrate the great work and good works Danny did. But today is a day to grieve."
Mr. Pearl was a 12-year veteran of the Journal, working in Atlanta, Washington, London and Paris before moving to Bombay to cover South Asia two years ago. For much of the last six years of his journalistic life, he dedicated himself to explaining the Arab and Islamic worlds to Wall Street Journal readers.
Born in Princeton, N.J., Mr. Pearl graduated in 1985 from Stanford University. Before joining the Journal in 1990, Mr. Pearl worked for several newspapers in Massachusetts, once winning an American Planning Association Award for a five-part series on land use.
A Skeptic
A skeptic of all institutions, from big government to big business, Mr. Pearl often seemed as much at home with his violin, playing bluegrass music, as he was filing stories as a top reporter at a newspaper.
He was always a music man, from classical to blues to country to bluegrass to rock 'n' roll. As lead violinist in an Atlanta band called The Ottoman Empire, Mr. Pearl received the thrill of his musical life in 1993 when his band opened for The Kinks at an Atlanta club. His music collection stretched from rhythm and blues musicians like Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack to salsa musicians like La India.
Mr. Pearl tended to pick up strays. At dinner parties in London, where he lived for three years, Mr. Pearl was known for last-minute phone calls to hosts, asking if he could bring additional guests. One year, he invited some people he met on the subway to the staff Thanksgiving dinner. "One thing about Danny: You invite him for dinner, you buy for 10 people," says Tom Jennings, a longtime friend. Mr. Jennings, a freelance journalist in New York, also recalls: "This was the man who wrote a song for my son days before his birth, encouraging him into the world. The song was called, 'The World Is Not a Bad Place.'"
He liked to cook. While working in the Atlanta bureau, Mr. Pearl received a bread maker from his mother for his birthday. For two years after that, he experimented with sometimes outlandish recipes. Another favored dish was stuffed grape leaves, which he trotted out when friends came to cry on his shoulder or to look for counsel or comfort.
He liked to shop, sometimes spending hours trolling offbeat shops in London's Covent Garden for the perfect orange shirt -- though he often walked around the Journal offices without shoes. Mr. Pearl, who attracted women by the droves, met Mariane at a party in Paris in 1998, and immediately announced that he had fallen in love.
The two were married in August 1999. They originally planned to get married in September but pushed up the date because Mariane's mother was dying of cancer. She held herself upright to walk her daughter down the aisle but was too sick to sit through the wedding reception. So it was from an upstairs window that she listened as her new son-in-law played Bach for her from below.
In Mr. Pearl, the Journal found the perfect reporter: highly individual, a skeptic, but one with an engaged eye and an open mind for stories big and small. In the Atlanta office, where he started his Journal career, he quickly showed he was a natural at spotting the quirky story. In February 1993, he got a story on the front page about a nine-year-old beauty queen who got stripped of her crown for singing Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy-Breaky Heart" at two dueling pageants. "She cannot perform as Little Miss Bookcase on Saturday, then Little Miss Georgia on Sunday," Mr. Pearl quoted one pageant executive as saying.
His eye for the unconventional was obvious to Journal readers. After becoming a Journal Middle East correspondent, he wrote a front-page piece about the revival of "pearl-diving" songs in the Persian Gulf, along with the accompanying belief that singing the wailing spirituals can cause blindness. "American blues can make you sad," Mr. Pearl wrote from Doha, Qatar, in 1996. "Russian work songs can make you suffer. The fervent belief of many in the Persian Gulf is that pearl-diving songs can make you go blind."
A Closer Look
In 1998, Mr. Pearl tackled the wrenching issue of the U.S. bombing of a Sudanese drug plant in August 1997. "Some U.S. allies and Washington officials still doubt the U.S. hit a legitimate target, and the full truth of El Shifa, wrapped in the divisive politics of antiterrorism, may never be known," Mr. Pearl wrote. "The hardest evidence is a scoop of soil, taken near the plant and judged by the U.S. to contain a chemical used to make nerve gas. But other evidence becomes murkier the closer you look."
In other stories from abroad, he wrote about the controversy that has swirled around the globe over how to make relatively inexpensive, generic AIDS drugs available in the Third World. And he chronicled the way terrorist leader Osama bin Laden used trade in tanzanite gemstones to finance his activities.
Beloved by his colleagues at the Journal, Mr. Pearl's sense of humor reared at odd times. During a friendly turf battle over a Pakistan trade story that a colleague in the Washington bureau was writing, Mr. Pearl kept quiet until after the story appeared in the paper. The day it appeared, his colleague wrote to apologize for not consulting him on the story first. Mr. Pearl replied with the following e-mail: "grumble. grumble, grumble. grumble grumble." He added that he actually owed the reporter an apology for not alerting her to a previous story.
The e-mail continued, "Okay, clean slate, but let me say this: I'm going to Pakistan Saturday, and from that point on, anybody who types the word Pakistan, Pakistani, Paki, Pak, Coldpak or Backpak without consulting me stands NO CHANCE AT ALL of getting illicit Cipro."
It was signed, "Danny."