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'Daniel Pearl' (October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002) was an American journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, Pakistan. At the time of his kidnapping, Pearl had been investigating the case of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and alleged links between Al Qaeda and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
In March 2007, at a closed military hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly boasted that he had personally beheaded Pearl.^[1]A transcript of the hearing quotes Mohammed as saying: "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan." Then he added, "for those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."
"Al-Qaida No. 3 says he planned 9/11, other plots", ''MSNBC'', March 15, 2007

9/11 mastermind admits killing reporter
In June 2007, a motion picture was released about the story of Daniel Pearl starring actress Angelina Jolie and actor Dan Futterman as Mariane and Daniel Pearl in Michael Winterbottom's ''A Mighty Heart (film)''. The film was based on the memoir written by Mariane Pearl.

Contents

Early life

Death

The Daniel Pearl video

Arrests

Aftermath

Lawsuit

Legacy

References

See also

Further reading

External links

Early life

Daniel Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in Encino in Los Angeles, California, where he attended Portola Middle School and Birmingham High School. His father, Judea Pearl, is a professor at UCLA. His mother, of Iraqi Jewish descent, is named Ruth. Danny, as he was known throughout his life, attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, where he stood out as a communications major with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a member of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity, and co-founded a student newspaper called the ''Stanford Commentator''. Pearl graduated Stanford with a B.A. in Communications, after which he spent a summer as a Pulliam Fellow intern at the ''Indianapolis Star'' and a winter bussing tables as a ski bum in Idaho. Following a trip to the then-Soviet Union, China, and Europe, he joined the ''North Adams Transcript'' and the ''Berkshire Eagle'' in western Massachusetts, then moved on to the ''San Francisco Business Times''.
In 1990, Pearl started in the ''The Wall Street Journal's Atlanta bureau and moved to the Washington, D.C. bureau in 1993 to cover telecommunications. He jumped to the Journal's London bureau in 1996, penning articles such as the October 1994 story of a Stradivarius violin allegedly found on a highway on-ramp^[2], and a June 2000 story about Iranian pop music.
Later, he met and married his wife Mariane. Their son, Adam Daniel Pearl was born in Paris on May 28, 2002, three months after Daniel's death.
In 2002, Pearl received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College (Awarded Posthumously): and, in 2007, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Moral Courage Award from the Houston Holocaust Museum.

Death

On January 23, 2002, on his way to what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani at the Village restaurant in Karachi, Pearl was kidnapped by a militant group calling itself ''The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty''. This group claimed Pearl was a CIA agent and — using the e-mail address [1] — sent the United States a range of demands, including the freeing of all Pakistani terror detainees, and the release of a halted U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government.
The message read:
: We give you one more day if America will not meet our demands we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.
Photos of Pearl handcuffed with a gun at his head and holding up a newspaper were attached. There was no response to pleas from Pearl's editor, and from his wife Mariane.
Nine days later, Pearl was murdered and beheaded. Pearl's body was found cut into ten pieces and buried in a shallow grave in the outskirts of Karachi on May 16. When the police found his remains, Abdul Sattar Edhi arrived promptly on the scene, personally collected all ten body parts, and took them to the morgue; then his body was returned to the United States and he was interred in the Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
(Although foul play was obvious, no autopsy was needed or performed. The subsequent video (see next section) made the sequence of events clear. Years later, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confessed to cutting off Pearl's head, but didn't state whether he had cut his throat: it is likely that one person did both.)

The Daniel Pearl video

On February 21, 2002, a videotape titled "The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl" was released. The video shows Pearl's mutilated body and lasts three minutes and thirty-six seconds.
The first part of the video shows Pearl stating his captors' demands. A caption in Arabic is shown along the way. Pictures of dead Muslims and similar scenes are superimposed around the image of Pearl. Other images shown are those of United States President George W. Bush shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
On the image to the right, the text in Arabic reads: My name is (Daniel Pearl), I am a Jewish-American...
Published reports say that a technical error prevents the first slashing of Pearl's throat from being captured on film. (This technical error conveniently prevented the video's use as evidence against the killers, even had they been promptly caught.) In the video, Pearl's body is shown naked from the waist up with his throat slit at about 1 minute and 55 seconds into the video, by which time he would have bled to death. A man then cuts his head off. A few more images, such as captives held at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, are shown near the image of Pearl's head. The last 90 seconds of the video show the list of demands scrolling, superimposed on an image of Pearl's severed head being held by the hair.
The English transcript of the text reads ¹:
: NATIONAL MOVEMENT FOR THE RESTORATION OF PAKISTAN SOVEREIGNTY (NMRPS)
: We still demand the following:
: - The immediate release of U.S. held prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
: - The return of Pakistani prisoners to Pakistan.
: - The immediate end of U.S. presence in Pakistan.
: - The delivery of F-16 planes that Pakistan had paid for and never received.
: We assure Americans that they shall never be safe on the Muslim Land of Pakistan.
: And if our demands are not met this scene shall be repeated again and again...
The video made its way to the Pakistani and United States governments. A jihadist site leaked the video onto the Internet.

Arrests

Three suspects were caught after the e-mail addresses that sent the ransom e-mail were traced by the Karachi Police.The arrests were carried out after investigation by Pakistani detective Mir Zubair Mahmood.[2]
On March 21, 2002, in Pakistan, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and three other suspects were charged with murder for their part in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. They were convicted on July 15, 2002 and Sheikh was sentenced to death. During the trial, Sheikh, the mastermind of the kidnapping, told investigators he had kidnapped Pearl to "strike a blow at the United States and embarrass the Pakistani government". Another of the suspects said Pearl had been targeted "because he was a Jew working against Islam".
On March 10, 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged Al Qaeda operative reported to be third in command under Osama Bin Laden, claimed responsibility, before his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, for the murder of Daniel Pearl.^[3]
In a confession read during his Tribunal hearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on record repeating:
: ''"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the City of Karachi, Pakistan."
This confession repeated, word for word, the phrasing leaked, in 2002, from his controversial interrogation in a clandestine CIA interrogation centre.^[4]
On March 19 2007 Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh's lawyers cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession in defense of their client.^[5][6]
They said they had always acknowledged that their client played a role in Pearl's murder, but they had always argued that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the actual murderer. They plan for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession to play a central role in their appeal of their client's death sentence.
In his book ''In the Line of Fire'', Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf states that Daniel Pearl's murderer was an agent of MI6 (British Intelligence), who at some point became a double agent.^[7]

Aftermath

A collection of Pearl's writings (''At Home in the World'') was published posthumously in 2002.
The Daniel Pearl Foundation was formed by Pearl's family and friends to continue Pearl's mission and to address what they consider the root causes of his death, in the spirit, style, and principles that shaped Pearl's work and character.^[8]
The principles cited include uncompromised objectivity and integrity; insightful and unconventional perspective; tolerance and respect for people of all cultures; unshaken belief in the effectiveness of education and communication; and the love of music, humor, and friendship. Daniel Pearl World Music Days have been held worldwide since 2002.
Pearl's widow, Mariane Pearl, wrote the memoir ''A Mighty Heart'' which tells the full story of Pearl and more about his life.^[9]
This has been adapted into a film starring Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman^[10], who, like Daniel Pearl, is a member of Alpha Delta Phi.
On September 1, 2003, a book titled ''Who Killed Daniel Pearl?'' was published, written by Bernard-Henri Lévy.^[11]
The book, which the author characterized as an "investigative novel", stirred controversy for some of its speculative conclusions about the killing, and for some of its characterizations of Pakistan, and for the author's decision to engage in an exercise of fictionalizing Pearl's thoughts at the end of his life. Lévy was criticized for the book.^{[12][13][14][15]}
This book is being adapted into a film directed by Tod Williams and starring Josh Lucas focusing on the last few days of Daniel Pearl's life.^[16]
HBO Films produced a 79-minute documentary titled ''The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl''. It premiered on HBO on October 10, 2006. The documentary chronicles Pearl's life and death, and features extensive interviews with his immediate family. It is narrated by Christiane Amanpour.
American modernist composer Steve Reich wrote his 2006 work ''The Daniel Variations'' in response to Pearl's murder.
Pearl's parents, Judea and Ruth, edited and published a collection of responses sent to them from around the globe, entitled ''I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl'' (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2004). Their son's final words on the video were "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish," after which Pearl added one obscure detail, that a street in Israel's Bene Barak is named after his grandfather. The family has written that they understand this last detail authenticates his own voice and demonstrates his willingness to claim his identity, even in the hands of deadly captors. Judea Pearl has written that at first, this statement surprised him. The seed idea to collect responses began when a girl from New York began to compile statements about being Jewish as her Bat Mitzvah project to create a future gift book for Daniels' son Adam. Judea Pearl then enlarged the idea by inviting response from artists, government leaders, authors, journalists, scientists, scholars, rabbis and others. All wrote personal responses to what they thought upon hearing that these were Danny's last words. Some responses are one sentence, others several pages.
The book is organized by five themes: Identity; Heritage; Covenant, Chosenness, and Faith; Humanity and Ethnicity; Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World) and Justice. Contributors include Theodore Bikel, Alan Dershowitz, Kirk Douglas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Larry King, Amos Oz, Shimon Peres, Daniel Schorr, Elie Wiesel, Peter Yarrow, and A.B. Yehoshua.

Lawsuit

Mariane Pearl is suing Pakistan’s Habib Bank bank and al-Qaeda, for the 2002 kidnapping, torture and murder of her husband.^[17]

Legacy

On April 16, 2007, Pearl was added to the Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach as the first non-Holocaust victim. His father, Judea Pearl, gave his consent for the induction in order to remind generations to come that "The forces of barbarity and evil are still active in our world. The Holocaust didn't finish in 1945." ^[18] Journalist Bradley Burston in Haaretz said that the addition of a non-victim to the memorial diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust.^[19]
In May, 2007, the Communications Technology Magnet School at Birmingham High School was renamed the Daniel Pearl Journalism and Communications Magnet.
Shortly after Daniel's death his parents, Ruth and Judea Pearl, founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation to further the ideals that inspired Daniel's life and work. The foundation's mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music, and dialogue. Its programs include: World Music Days which uses the power of music to promote tolerance and inspire respect for differences; PEARL World Youth News which provides an online journalist certification course for High School Students; Annual Daniel Pearl Journalism and Editorial Fellowships which brings mid-career foreign journalists and editors to work for six months in a US newsroom; the Daniel Pearl Media Internship Program which provides media internships to young Israelis and Palestinians who have attended a peace camp; and The Daniel Pearl Dialogues for Muslim-Jewish Understanding - a traveling public dialogue in which professors Judea Pearl and Akbar Ahmed discuss Muslim-Jewish
relationships in a frank and respectful discourse.
The honorary board of the Daniel Pearl Foundation includes Christiane Amanpour,
President William J. Clinton, Abdul Sattar Edhi, Danny Gill, John Hennessy, Ted Koppel, Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, Sari Nusseibeh, Mariane Pearl, Itzhak Perlman, Harold Schulweiss, Craig Sherman, Paul Steiger, and Elie Wiesel.

References

1. Mount, Mike. "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: I beheaded American reporter", CNN, March 15, 2007.
2. http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/pearl101794.htm
3.
Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024 (ie. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed)
4. Daniel Pearl
5.
Militant convicted of Pearl killing to rely on KSM Guantanamo confession on appeal
6.
Pearl murder convict to appeal after confession
7.
President dubs alleged Pearl killer MI6 spy
8.
Daniel Pearl Foundation
9.
A Mighty Heart
10.
The Race To Put Pearl On Screen
11.
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
12.
Who killed Daniel Pearl?
13.
Murder in Karachi William Dalrymple
14.
['Murder in Karachi': An Exchange Bernard-Henri Levy, William Dalrymple
15.
Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
16.
Zwick to Make Film About Daniel Pearl
17. Daniel Pearl’s widow sues al-Qaeda By Victoria Kim in New York Published: July 19 2007 02:01
18. http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/departments/newsroom/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003572119
19. [3]


★ Video Reveals the Hideous Sacrifice of Captive Reporter; Pearl murder gruesome tape shows American speaking into camera as unknown killer slits his throat, then beheads him

★ Kidnappers Cut Pearl's Throat Videotape Shows Newsman's Brutal Slaying - 'Fahad Naseem, one of the three militants accused of kidnapping Pearl, told a judge in Karachi yesterday that Pearl was kidnapped because he was "a Jew and is working against Islam."'

★ Suspect in Reporter's Death Is Wanted in Attacks on Musharraf - 'The intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that information from American intelligence agencies helped Pakistani investigators track down the ring involved in the plot. Information from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's former head of operations who was captured in March 2002, aided the investigation, he said. American officials say they believe that Mr. Mohammed was the person who actually killed Mr. Pearl.'

See also

★ Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh

★ Amjad Hussain Farooqi

★ 2006 Fox journalists kidnapping

★ Decapitation

★ Eugene Armstrong

★ Nick Berg

★ Paul Marshall Johnson, Jr.

★ Kim Sun-il

★ Jack Hensley

★ Kenneth Bigley

★ Shosei Koda

★ Margaret Hassan

★ Seif Adnan Kanaan

Further reading

★ Pearl, Daniel, ''At Home in the World: Collected Writings from the Wall Street Journal'', New York: Free Press, June 2002. ISBN 0-7432-4317-X

★ Pearl, Mariane, and Sarah Crichton, ''A Mighty Heart'', New York: Scribner, 2003. ISBN 0-7432-4442-7

★ ''I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl'', Ruth & Judea Pearl, eds., Jewish Lights Pub., January 2004. ISBN 1-58023-183-7

★ Lévy, Bernard-Henri, ''Who Killed Daniel Pearl?'', Melville House Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-9718659-4-9

External links

★ Remembering Daniel Pearl

★ Rewards for Justice Daniel Pearl Page

★ The Guardian: "The Pakistan connection"

★ Asia Times — Who killed Daniel Pearl?

★ South Asian Journalists Association Roundup

★ Wall Street Journal selection of stories by Daniel Pearl

★ Daniel Pearl Foundation

★ About Pearl's dual citizenship

★ The Black Sites - A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program