TEL AVIV/ISLAMABAD, 26 February — Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and killed in Pakistan, was an Israeli citizen. In a recent revelation in Israel, Pearl was said to be reporting for years on extraordinarily controversial subjects for an extremely controversial pro-Israeli publication.
Neither he nor the publication ever revealed this highly compromising fact to readers. Professor Yehuda Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl, recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he fears that making public his son’s Israeli citizenship could adversely affect investigative efforts by Pakistani police to apprehend the killers and track down the murdered reporter’s body.
In a telephone conversation from his Los Angeles residence, Professor Pearl expressed regret and anger over the revelation by the Israeli media of his family’s “Israeli connection.”
The US media, which were aware of the information, complied with the family’s request not to make it public. The American media were asked to comply with this request after information was obtained that confirmed reports that the 38-year-old reporter was dead.
Professor Pearl said he was told of his son’s death Thursday by US government officials after they had viewed the videotape and were convinced of its authenticity. According to assessments presented to Professor Pearl, his son was killed ten days after being kidnapped on Jan. 23. The date of his death is based on experts’ viewing of the videotape and was determined according to the length of Pearl’s beard, as seen on the tape.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani police warned foreign organizations in the country that they should be careful due to the fact that Pearl’s kidnapping may be part of a more far-reaching terrorist plot. They also reported that the man who delivered the videotape documenting Pearl’s murder was arrested for questioning in Karachi, located in southern Pakistan.
Sheikh Omar, the self-confessed mastermind of Pearl’s abduction, is a former English public schoolboy whose concern for Bosnian Muslims led him into the murky underworld of militants. Omar, who was remanded in police custody for a further 14 days after a brief court appearance yesterday, was arrested on Feb. 12, 20 days after Pearl disappeared in the southern port city of Karachi.
Omar, whose full name is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, comes from a respected business family in the eastern city of Lahore, the Punjab provincial capital, where police finally seized him.
Born in 1973 in London where his father ran a shop, Omar went to Lahore to attend the prestigious Aitchison College, returning to Britain to study at the London School of Economics, which he left before graduating. “Many of his close relatives enjoy good positions in the government’s civil service, but his faith in jihad, or holy war, took him into a different world,” a Karachi-based cleric told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Omar’s father said his son’s Islamic zeal sprouted when he took up arms alongside Muslims in Bosnia to fight the Serbs. “That was a turning point in his life,” his father was quoted as saying by one of the police investigators. “From then on he devoted himself to Islamic struggle.”
