ISLAMABAD, 4 February — Investigators failed to find any sign of kidnapped US reporter Daniel Pearl yesterday, as a spate of messages, including one saying the reporter had been killed, were dismissed as hoaxes.
“Most of the recent e-mail messages and phone calls have now proved to be hoaxes. We are hopeful that Pearl is alive and that we will trace him,” a senior police official in Karachi told Reuters.
But as frustration over a lack of leads mounted, a newly formed squad led by the country’s top anti-terrorism expert, US-trained Mir Zubair Mahmood, turned its attention to areas outside Karachi and possible links to desert tribes, said a source close to the team.
“Investigators are focusing outside Karachi with some police parties being sent to interior parts of southern Sindh province and areas bordering Balochistan province,” the source said.
“The kidnappers might have shifted Pearl to some interior parts of the province, which are known for harboring criminals and providing them protection.”
The source said a lack of progress in the investigation had been partly blamed on poor coordination between various law enforcement and intelligence agencies, a problem the new squad hoped to solve.
Pearl disappeared in Karachi on Jan. 23 while trying to contact militant groups believed to be linked to Osama Bin Laden.
Police said they detained a teenager who confessed to making a hoax ransom demand.
“We raided a house in Islamabad last night and detained a young boy,” he said. “The boy accepted he had made the ransom call to the US Embassy on Friday. He was later released.”
The fate of Pearl, 38, was thrown into question on Friday when one message said he had been killed, but another demanded the release of a top Taleban prisoner held captive by the United States and $2 million. A US official said no conclusion had been reached on the authenticity of the messages, but Pearl’s newspaper said it thought both were fake and he was still alive. Pearl’s wife, Mariane, who is six months pregnant, appealed at the weekend for her husband’s release. “What will they get by torturing an innocent man, who is invariably a sympathizer of all neglected people?” she said in an appeal published in the country’s largest Urdu-language daily Jang. “I appeal to these people to release him.” A number of e-mails from people claiming to hold Pearl contained threats to kill the reporter and demanded the release of prisoners from the Afghan war being held by US forces. Some messages from a previously unknown group, the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, included photographs of Pearl with a pistol to his head and warned US journalists to leave Pakistan or risk being “targeted”.
Brig. Mukhtar Ahmed, interior secretary in Sindh province, told Reuters the investigation was “inching forward” and every threat was being taken seriously.
The source close to the investigation said top Pakistani and US security officials, including agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), have been cooperating closely on the case.
Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider who flew to Karachi after meeting senior US officials in Islamabad told newsmen police had arrested two young boys working in an Internet cafe and were questioning them for possible clues.
“We have made some progress, but not enough,” Haider admitted.
He said he was happy that the American woman of Indian origin, Asra Nomani, was cooperating with the police. Pearl had stayed at her place and telephone calls and e-mails from his alleged kidnappers were also received at her address.
In Washington, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice yesterday demanded the immediate release of Pearl. “Pearl needs to be released right away,” Rice said on Fox News yesterday. “We just hope that this can come to a resolution very quickly.”
In Munich, Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said his country was still hunting for Pearl, dismissing messages that suggested he had been killed. “We have made the determination that the telephone call that came yesterday to the US Embassy and the e-mail were false, that they did not give correct information,” Sattar told Reuters Television on the fringes of a security conference in Germany.
“We hope that Pearl is still alive and we are continuing to make all the efforts that we can,” he said.
Sattar said the search would have been made easier if Pearl had left the names, numbers and addresses of people he planned to meet.
