Word: pearling
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...urgency three days later when reporters and news agencies in Pakistan and the U.S. booted up their computers to find a message from a Hotmail subscriber named "kidnapperguy" who claimed to represent a group called the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. The quixotic ransom note accused Pearl of working for the CIA--a charge vehemently denied by the Journal and the CIA--and demanded that the U.S. release the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef and the Pakistanis it is holding at its base in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of terrorist links...
...demands may have been preposterous, but the photos attached to the e-mail were bone chilling. In one, two hands held a black 9-mm pistol to Pearl's head. A later barrage of e-mails accused Pearl of working for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and claimed Pearl would be executed if the group's demands were not met at once. The group also warned other U.S. journalists to leave Pakistan or "be targeted." The affair underscores the dangers journalists have faced in the region since the U.S. launched its war in Afghanistan; eight have been killed...
...confusion deepened Friday when an e-mail sent to news organizations, including CNN and Fox, claimed that Pearl had been executed and that his body could be found in an unspecified graveyard in Karachi. Someone else called the U.S. embassy in Islamabad demanding $2 million for Pearl's return. Attempts to trace the e-mails have so far proved inconclusive; the Wall Street Journal, for its part, said on Saturday that it believes Pearl may still be alive...
Pakistani investigators and the FBI have illuminated the sequence of events leading to Pearl's kidnapping--but little else. The correspondent arrived in Karachi, a bustling southern port city, on Jan. 22 with his wife Marianne, a French national and freelance journalist who is six months pregnant. Pakistani officials say Pearl had earlier spent a week in a town called Bahawalpur, home to the founder of the banned terrorist group Jaish-e-Muhammad. On the day he was abducted, Pearl had a midafternoon meeting at the U.S. consulate and then met with Jameel Yusuf, the head of Karachi's Citizen...
...includes operatives of Jaish-e-Muhammad and Pir Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, the leader of Jamaat al-Fuqra, an obscure extremist group that has branches in the U.S. The group is thought to have cultivated the shoe bomber Richard Reid's incipient fanaticism while he studied Islam in Pakistan. Pearl, it turns out, had hoped to interview Gilani for a story he was developing about Reid. Last week police raided the home of Pearl's liaison to Gilani, a man who goes by the alias "Arif." But inside they found his relatives mourning him, claiming he had just died...