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New team to trace Daniel Pearl
By B. Muralidhar Reddy
ISLAMABAD, FEB. 3. Ten days after his disappearance from Karachi, there is no definite word on the fate of the American reporter, Daniel Pearl, of the Wall Street Journal, and the conflicting claims on his well-being, made through e-mails, seem to have only added to the confusion. Pakistani police have concluded that the messages received in the last 48 hours on Pearl's fate were a ``hoax.'' A new joint investigation team, consisting of senior Pakistani police officers and sleuths of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is working on new leads.
Reports from Karachi said police were interrogating 12 persons over Pearl's abduction. ``No one has been formally arrested so far,'' Manzoor Mughal, a chief investigator, was quoted as saying.
Police detained a teenaged boy here for confessing to making a hoax ransom demand. The boy had made the ransom call to the U.S. embassy on Friday. ``He was later released,'' a senior official said.
In a related development, the former Director-General of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, Hamid Gul, said the abduction of Pearl might be a reaction to the American bombing of Afghanistan or what the U.S. had been doing in other parts of the world.
``This is totally a new name and I do not really know how this group came into being,'' he said of the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, which has owned responsibility for Pearl's kidnapping. ``It may be because of the reaction to the American bombing in Afghanistan or whatever they did... at least from the e-mails they have been sending, this appears to be the message,'' he told the BBC.
Marianne Pearl's plea
AFP reports from Karachi:
Pearl's pregnant wife made an impassioned plea for her husband's release, calling on his captors to recognise him as a ``man before an American.'' In an open letter sent to the news agencies and addressed to the Pakistanis on Saturday, Marianne Pearl said she felt ``compelled to do this because I have seen (Pearl) mistaken today as a symbol of things that have brought suffering to the world... I ask his kidnappers to set him free as people inspired by Islam's ethics. I ask them to be people who have the courage to actually take the first step to end this cycle of suffering.''
Sattar hopes Pearl is alive
Reuters reports from Munich:
``We hope that Daniel Pearl is still alive,'' the Pakistan Foreign Minister, Abdul Sattar, said on the fringes of a security conference. Mr. Sattar said the search would have been made easier if Pearl had left the names, numbers and addresses of the people he had planned to meet.
`Release Pearl immediately'
The U.S. President, George W. Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, urged Pearl's kidnappers to release him immediately, a Washington report said.
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