Officials claim Wall Street Journal reporter dead
NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is dead, the State Department said Thursday, a month after the journalist was abducted by Islamic extremists in Pakistan.
Pakistani authorities said a videotape indicated Pearl, kidnapped in the port city of Karachi on Jan. 23, had been killed.
“The recorded video contained scenes showing Mr. Pearl in captivity and scenes of his murder by the kidnappers. The tape appears to be correct. Necessary instructions to the investigation teams have been issued to apprehend the remaining culprits,” said Mukhtar Ahmad Sheikh, interior minister of the Sindh province, which includes Karachi.
Pearl was abducted after arranging to interview the leader of a radical Muslim faction with purported ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network and terror suspect Richard C. Reid, arrested in December on a Paris-Miami flight he allegedly boarded with explosives in his shoes.
Pakistani police have seized several suspects, including an extremist who said in court that he engineered Pearl’s abduction.
In Washington, the State Department said the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan received evidence Thursday that Pearl is dead, but spokesman Richard Boucher provided no details on the evidence.
Two U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a videotape purportedly showed Pearl either dead or being killed, and the FBI was evaluating the tape’s authenticity.
The Pakistani minister refused to say whether he or other Pakistani officials had seen the videotape or what “the scene of his death” meant.
The Journal said it believed Pearl was dead.
“His murder is an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of everything Danny’s kidnappers claimed to believe in,” the newspaper said in a statement. “They claimed to be Pakistani nationalists, but their actions must surely bring shame to all true Pakistani patriots.”
Journal spokesman Steve Goldstein said he did not know if a body had been recovered.
Richard Pyle, Associated Press Writer