U.S. Reporter’s Captors Extend Killing Deadline

In an e-mail to Pakistani and Western media organizations, the group claiming to have kidnapped U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl said Thursday that it will extend its execution deadline 24 hours.

“We will give u 1 more day,” said the e-mail, the third such oddly written communication in four days from the abductors. “If America will not meet our demands we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.”

Pearl, 38, the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, disappeared Jan. 23 in the teeming southern port city of Karachi. He was apparently investigating a possible link between a Pakistan-based Islamic militant group and alleged “shoe bomber” Richard C. Reid.

Thursday’s e-mail came as a senior Pakistani government official admitted that the country’s law enforcement agencies were still baffled by the group’s identity and its objectives. The group calls itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, and some of its e-mails have included photos of Pearl with a gun at his head.

“It doesn’t smack of any group we know,” Tasneem Noorani, the No. 2 official in Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, said in an interview. “There’s no tradition in this country of internal terrorism or terrorism directed against foreigners.”

“Our problem so far has been sectarian terrorism,” Noorani added, referring to the near-nightly warfare in Karachi between members of militant Sunni and Shiite Muslim sects.

Although the kidnappers have e-mailed news organizations, they have so far made no contact with the Pakistani government or shown any interest in beginning negotiations, Pakistani military and civilian officials said.

Noorani confirmed reports that intense questioning Wednesday of militant Islamic leader Sheik Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani had proved disappointing. Gilani had been considered an important figure in the case because he was the person Pearl was trying to contact when he was abducted.

Meanwhile, Pakistani military intelligence sources said their investigation has begun to focus on small terrorist cells within a group called the Mohajir Quami Movement, also known as the Muttahida Quami Movement, that draws support from Pakistan’s Mohajir minority. The Mohajir are Muslim families who migrated mainly from the Hindu-dominated states of central India to Karachi and other southern cities in Pakistan when the British agreed to partition the subcontinent into a secular India and the Islamic state of Pakistan in 1947.

The Mohajir, who aspire to their own autonomous area within Pakistan, include a cluster of small but militant cells, at least one of which is staunchly anti-American, according to a Pakistani source familiar with the group.

Two Mohajir Quami Movement members were executed for their role in the 1997 killings of four U.S. oil workers and their Pakistani driver in Karachi.

Still, many questions remain unanswered, those involved in the investigation said Thursday.

Pearl’s kidnapping is atypical for Karachi, a fractious, multiethnic port city known more for the snatching of business figures and VIPs for ransom.

As far as authorities know, there was no gun-to-the-temple hustling off of Pearl, who instead simply disappeared after setting up an appointment at a hotel restaurant.

“Here it seems to be a very smooth, mellow kind of affair, which has ended up in a kidnapping,” Noorani said.

Noorani termed the kidnappers’ objectives “shifty.” They have demanded that U.S. military authorities release Pakistani prisoners among the Al Qaeda suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, and they have complained about harm done to Afghan citizens during U.S. bombing runs.

Other aspects of the e-mails, their sophisticated delivery and the senders’ knowledge of U.S. media have led authorities to believe at least some of the kidnappers are well educated.

“They obviously know about e-mails because they keep changing names and routing them differently,” Noorani said. “They are obviously into international publicity, and they are getting it. They are not part of the uncouth, locally educated group of people. One or two of them are smart.”

Noorani hinted at outside responsibility for the kidnapping, including Pakistan’s rival, India.

“To me, it seems to be a gambit to malign the image of the emerging Pakistan as a progressive, secular safe place,” he said.

Despite a professed lack of knowledge about the group, Noorani played down the seriousness of the kidnappers’ threat to begin killing U.S. journalists in Pakistan.

“I really wouldn’t take that very seriously,” he said. But he cautioned correspondents to be careful about where they travel and what they investigate. “I think the journalists should stick to the normal standard location and have good local guides,” he said, adding that they should not be “unnecessarily enterprising.”

In an open letter to the kidnappers Thursday, the Wall Street Journal expressed gratitude for the deadline extension. It also offered a possible way out of the crisis, saying, “Journalists are, by definition, trained messengers. Danny can be your messenger.

“A freed Danny can explain your cause, and your beliefs, to the world. His record as a journalist is proof that he can do this honestly and effectively. A captive or killed Danny cannot speak for you, cannot help you or your cause.”

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Times staff writer Bob Drogin in Washington contributed to this report.