About Daniel Pearl
Daniel Pearl was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped by jihadist militants while he was on his way to what he had expected would be an interview with Pakistani Islamic scholar Mubarak Ali Gilani in Karachi, Pakistan. Pearl had moved to Mumbai, India, upon taking up a regional posting by his newspaper and later entered Pakistan to cover the war on terror, which was launched by the United States in response to the September 11 attacks in 2001. At the time of his abduction, he had been investigating the alleged links between British citizen Richard Reid and al-Qaeda; Reid had reportedly completed his training at a facility owned by Gilani, who had been accused by the United States of being affiliated with the Pakistani terrorist organization Jamaat ul-Fuqra. Shortly after Pearl's death, his parents founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation. Judea Pearl has written that at first this statement surprised him, but he later understood it to be a reference to the town-building tradition of his family, in contrast with the destructive aims of his captors. On April 16, 2007, Pearl was added to the Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach as the first non-Holocaust victim. He became more involved in international affairs: his most notable investigations covered the ethnic wars in the Balkans, where he discovered that charges of an alleged genocide committed in Kosovo were unsubstantiated.
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