Pearl Slaying May Be Tied to Year-Old Plot

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan —  Investigators in Pakistan said Friday that they are seeking at least seven suspects in the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and hinted at a conspiracy stretching to the Middle East and dating to more than a year ago.

Pearl’s captors visited at least one Persian Gulf country in what intelligence sources believe to be an “extra-regional” conspiracy that targeted Pearl through contacts he made with them as many as 18 months ago, according to Pakistani intelligence sources.

The suspects are hardened Islamic jihad veterans who fought in Afghanistan, the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir and the separatist Russian republic of Chechnya, according to one source.

“You’re looking at a backlog of jihadis--people who are highly motivated,” the source said. “They are not desperadoes.”

That interpretation of the kidnapping, based on investigations into the videotape of Pearl’s execution that was delivered to the U.S. Consulate in the port city of Karachi, where the journalist disappeared Jan. 23, greatly differs from earlier theories put out by Pakistani police that Pearl may have stumbled inadvertently, and recently, onto a criminal gang.

Neither the suspects nor Pearl’s body was found Friday, as investigators questioned the man who delivered the videotape to the consulate, according to police sources.

In Washington, U.S. officials said Friday that Pearl’s killers forced him to read a prepared statement denouncing American support for Israel and the U.S. presence in Afghanistan before they slashed his throat and decapitated him on camera, officials said.

Pearl also can be heard on the brief video saying that he and his father, an Israeli who lives in Encino, are Jewish. Moments later, according to officials familiar with the tape, an unseen assailant suddenly grabbed Pearl by the neck and brutally attacked him with a knife.

One U.S. official said Pearl’s statement was several sentences long and “criticizes U.S. policy in support of Israel, and then speaks out against the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.”

The official said the message did not appear to be from Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network, but he declined to be more specific. “That would be giving the bad guys precisely what they want, which is to get their propaganda out there,” the official said.

U.S. officials said that the vicious nature of the killing, combined with a scripted political diatribe, suggested that Pearl’s abductors were seasoned terrorists who probably never planned to release him.

The Pakistani Foreign Ministry called Pearl’s killing “an outrage against the cherished values of our society,” and President Pervez Musharraf pledged to continue his government’s crackdown on extremist groups that have flourished here.

“For those who commit terrorist acts, it is Pakistan’s resolve, as well as my own personal resolve, that terrorism will be eradicated from Pakistan,” Musharraf told state-owned Pakistan Television on Friday.

Federal and local government officials visited Pearl’s widow, Mariane, who is seven months pregnant with the couple’s first child. “She was very confident, and she praised the work of law enforcement,” said Brig. Mukhtar Ahmed, the home secretary of Sindh province, where Karachi is located.

In a statement released by the Journal, Mariane Pearl said: “The terrorists who say they killed my husband may have taken his life, but they did not take his spirit. Danny is my life. They may have taken my life, but they did not take my spirit.”

Investigators have abandoned the caution they exercised when they feared for Pearl’s safety, said Jameel Yusuf, a Karachi businessman who heads a police-citizens liaison committee on kidnappings and is close to the investigation.

“This will be expedited because the loss of life has already occurred, so there’s not as much need for caution,” said Yusuf, who has worked on numerous kidnapping cases in Karachi.

The frantic activity since Pearl’s disappearance, Yusuf said, was unusual for Pakistani police. “We are doing things we have never done for our own people,” he said. In fact, many officers were kept at work during the Eid al-Adha holiday marking the end of the hajj, or pilgrimage to the Saudi city of Mecca.

Yusuf, one of the last people to have seen Pearl alive, had been convinced to the end that the Journal’s South Asia bureau chief remained alive, and learning of his death on the eve of a festive Muslim holiday came as a personal blow.

“I couldn’t see the purpose of killing Daniel,” he said. “It hasn’t gained them anything. On the contrary, they have lost everything.”

He noted that it was odd that Pearl’s body had not been found, even though police sources believe that Pearl was killed some time ago.

Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born Islamic militant who confessed to masterminding the kidnapping during a court hearing last week, has said he was told by captors that Pearl was killed around Jan. 31.

Among the seven suspects being sought are two identified by police as Amjad Hussain Farooqi and Mohammed Hashim Qadeer, who are believed to be connected to the violently radical group Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is fighting to wrest parts of Kashmir from Indian control.

Authorities believe that the two men used telephone conversations and false e-mail identities to set up a fake meeting at a local restaurant in downtown Karachi from which Pearl vanished. Pearl, 38, was investigating e-mails between accused “shoe bomber” Richard C. Reid and a militant group, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, and believed that he would interview the group’s leader, Sheik Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani.

Four days later, a hitherto unknown group that dubbed itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty sent out the first of two e-mails with photographs of Pearl in captivity. Among other ultimatums, the abductors demanded the release of all Pakistani prisoners taken by U.S. forces in the fighting in Afghanistan, and of the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan.

The group followed up Jan. 30 with photos of Pearl with a gun to his head, and a threat to execute him within 24 hours, a deadline it now appears the group obeyed.

Even with Friday’s new leads, mystery still cloaked Sheikh’s role in the kidnapping.

Hamid Mir, editor of the Urdu-language Ausaf newspaper in the capital, Islamabad, said he interviewed Sheikh and was left with the impression that the suspect was mentally unstable. Mir, who has been kidnapped himself, is the last reporter known to have interviewed Bin Laden, and has monitored terrorist groups for more than a decade.

“I thought his mental state was unstable,” Mir said. “He would be very pro-jihad, then anti-Pakistan, then anti-American, and then he would talk about founding a progressive school, where kids could learn computers. I thought he was a very gone case and very dangerous.”

Mir said he suspects that Sheikh had the backing of sinister forces, perhaps ousted and disgruntled members of Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which supported the Taliban, domestic jihad groups and the anti-Soviet moujahedeen before them.

Musharraf has fired the head of ISI and reshuffled mid-level brigadiers in an attempt to break the agency’s ties with radical groups, and the kidnapping is seen as a response aimed at embarrassing the president.

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Mohan reported from Islamabad and Drogin from Washington.