REMEMERING DANIEL PEARL

REMEMBERING DANIEL PEARL

 

(October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002)

Daniel Pearl was kidnapped on January 23, 2003 while working as the South Asia Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal, based in Mumbai, India. He had gone to Pakistan as part of an investigation into the alleged links between Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and Al-Qaeda. He was subsequently beheaded by his captors.

On February 21, 2002, a videotape was released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The video shows Pearl's mutilated body, and lasts 3 minutes and 36 seconds.

Daniel Pearl states his identity in the video produced by his captors. The text reads Arabic: اسمی دانیال بیرل، انا یھودی امریکی‎ My name is Daniel Pearl. I'm a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father's side the family is Zionist. My father's Jewish, my mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We've made numerous family visits to Israel.

Following these statements, Daniel Pearl's throat is slit, and his head is severed and held by a "gloating murderer".The ending of the video concludes with the captors demanding the release of all Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, and warns that if their demands are not met, they would repeat the scene "again and again."

On May 16 his severed head and decomposed body were found cut into ten pieces, and buried—along with the jacket of a tracksuit Pearl was wearing when photographed by his kidnappers—in a shallow grave at Gadap, about 30 miles north of Karachi.

When the police found Pearl's remains, Abdul Sattar Edhi, one of the most active philanthropists in Pakistan, arrived promptly on the scene, personally collected all ten body parts, and took them to the morgue. Pearl's body was returned to the U.S., and was interred in the Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. No autopsy was performed as the subsequent video made obvious the sequence of events leading to Pearl's death.

In July 2002, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, was sentenced to death by hanging for Pearl's abduction and murder.

         

In March 2007, at a closed military hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said that he had personally beheaded Pearl.

“Civilized society, so it seems,

is so numbed by violence

 that it has lost its gift

To be disgusted by evil.”

~ Judea Pearl, Father ~