Daniel Pearl

Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002) was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped near a restaurant in downtown Karachi and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan.

Pearl's kidnapping was carried out by Islamist militants after Pearl had gone to Pakistan as part of an investigation into the alleged links between British citizen Richard Reid (known as the "Shoe Bomber") and al-Qaeda.

Pearl was beheaded by his captors, who later released a video of his murder.

Danny, as he was known throughout his life, attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, where he stood out as a Communication major with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a co-founder of a student newspaper called the Stanford Commentator, as well as a reporter for the campus radio station KZSU.

Pearl graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in Communication, after which he spent a summer as a Pulliam Fellow intern at The Indianapolis Star.

Following a trip to the Soviet Union, China and Europe, Pearl started his professional journalism career at the North Adams Transcript and The Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts.

From there he moved to the San Francisco Business Times.

In 1990, Pearl moved to the Atlanta bureau of The Wall Street Journal and moved again in 1993 to its Washington, D.C., bureau to cover telecommunications.

His articles covered a range of topics, such as the October 1994 story of a Stradivarius violin allegedly found on a highway on-ramp and a June 2000 story about Iranian pop music.

He became more involved in international affairs: his most notable investigations covered the ethnic wars in the Balkans, where he discovered that charges of an alleged genocide committed in Kosovo were unsubstantiated.

He also explored the American missile attack on a supposed military facility in Khartoum, which he proved to have been a pharmaceutical factory.

In 1996, he was assigned to the London bureau and in 1999 to Paris.

In 1999 in Paris, Pearl met and married French journalist Mariane van Neyenhoff, a former reporter and columnist for Glamour.

They travelled to Karachi, Pakistan, which he used as a base for reporting on the United States' War on Terrorism following the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda terrorists in 2001 in the United States.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, was sentenced to death by hanging for Pearl's abduction and murder in July 2002, but his conviction was overturned by a Pakistani court in 2020.

Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, to Judea and Ruth Pearl (née Rejwan).

His father is an Israeli-American of Polish Jewish descent, and his mother was an Iraqi Jew whose family was saved from the Farhud by Muslim neighbors.

His family moved to Encino, a neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles, when his father took a position with the University of California, Los Angeles as professor of computer science and statistics and later director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory.

Their son, Adam Daniel Pearl, was born in Paris on May 28, 2002, approximately four months after Pearl's abduction and death.

The Pearls settled in Mumbai, India, after Daniel Pearl was made Southeast Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal.

On January 23, 2002, on his way to what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani at the Village Restaurant in downtown Karachi about terrorist Richard Reid's alleged training at one of Gilani's camps in Pakistan, Pearl was kidnapped near the Metropole Hotel at 7:00 p.m. by several Islamist jihadist groups working in collaboration.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a member of the Harkat ul-Ansar/Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and later Jaish-e-Mohammed, has admitted to planning and committing the kidnapping but denied being involved in Pearl's murder.

The beheading video of Pearl was released by Jaish-e-Mohammed, under the pseudonym of "National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty" (also used in ransom emails) and Jaish member Amjad Farooqi was reportedly involved in the kidnapping and murder.

In 2011, Judea Pearl received the Turing Award, the 'Nobel Prize for Computer Science'.

The history of the family and its connections to Israel are described by Judea Pearl in the Los Angeles Times article, "Roots in the Holy Land".

Pearl attended Portola Junior High School and Birmingham High School.

In a January 2011 report prepared by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), members of other Pakistani terrorist groups such as Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan were also stated to be involved in Pearl's kidnapping and murder.

The lead author of the report was Pearl's friend and colleague in Pakistan, journalist Asra Nomani.

All of the aforementioned groups were operating under the Lashkar-e-Omar umbrella.

Al-Qaeda leaders were also involved in the kidnapping and murder of Pearl, with Saif al-Adel playing a role in organizing the kidnapping and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was personally identified in investigative reports as the one who killed Pearl.

Pearl was detained and later killed at an Al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi owned by Pakistani businessman Saud Memon.

Matiur Rehman, another al-Qaeda leader has been identified as being involved in the kidnapping.

The militants claimed Pearl was a spy and—using a Hotmail e-mail address—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.

The group did not respond to public pleas for release of the journalist by his editor and his wife Mariane.

United States intelligence forces tried to track down the kidnappers.

Nine days later, the terrorists beheaded Pearl.

On May 16, his severed head and decomposed body were found cut into ten pieces, and buried, along with an identifying jacket, in a shallow grave at Gadap, about 30 mi north of Karachi.