Slaying of reporter planned, police say

Associated Press

KARACHI, Pakistan — The gruesome, videotaped execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl suggests that his killing was carefully planned by kidnappers who probably never intended to set him free, police sources said Friday.

Despite issuing a series of political demands shortly after Pearl’s abduction four weeks ago, it now seems clear that the kidnappers planned to kill Pearl from the very beginning, for reasons that remain murky, police officials said.

The possible motives range from sending a warning to Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not to crack down on Islamic extremists, to retaliating against the United States for its war in Afghanistan.

In addition, news accounts have been rife in recent weeks with suggestions that Pearl was targeted by people with ties to secret Pakistani government agencies because of a sensitive story he was working on.

"It seems that they wanted to kill Daniel from the moment they kidnapped him," a senior police investigator said Friday. "We now believe that killing Daniel in the most gruesome fashion and releasing its video to the outside world was the topmost priority of his kidnappers. The barbaric murder and its filming was part of the plan from the very beginning."

Pearl, 38, was kidnapped Jan. 23 from the front of a Karachi restaurant, where he had gone to meet and interview the head of a radical Islamic organization. That man, who never met Pearl, was later interrogated and cleared by police, who believe the promised interview was a ruse by others to lure Pearl into the kidnapping.

Late Thursday, a videotape was delivered to the U.S. Consulate in Karachi showing Pearl sitting in apparently casual conversation, and then abruptly having his throat slashed by several people whose faces were not visible.

Pakistani Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said authorities were searching for four other suspects and vowed to break the case. "We know their names, we know their identities," he said at a briefing in Islamabad. "We are surely after them, and once that is done the whole network will be broken."

"This can’t be the work of a small group," a second police investigator said. "Even in the last act, there were at least eight to 10 people present on the scene," including at least five in the room where Pearl was killed, he said.

A U.S. source said Pearl could be heard saying that he was Jewish and that his father was Jewish, presumably under direction of his kidnappers. Pearl was forced to read a statement denouncing U.S. actions in the region, the source said, before one of his assailants suddenly grabbed him and slit his throat.

Copyright ©2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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