Abducted Reporter Slain in Pakistan, E-Mail Claims

An e-mail message believed to have been sent by the kidnappers of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl claimed Friday that he had been killed because their demands for the release of Pakistani terror suspects had not been met.

“We have killed Mr. Danny Now Mr bush can find his body in the grave yards of Karachi we have thrown him there,” the message read. “The Reason why we killed him is because US killed so many people in Afghanistan and other parts of the world.”

The claim about Pearl, who disappeared last week in the port city of Karachi, could not be verified.

By this morning, police said, officers had searched about 300 cemeteries and had turned up nothing.

Police sources in Karachi early today confirmed that they had raided a house in the city and seized a computer that they believed were used to send some of the e-mails. They declined to elaborate on the development, and there was no immediate indication that the raid had shed any light on Pearl’s fate.

The rambling, randomly punctuated missive, which appeared similar in style to earlier messages, said Pearl was “collateral damage” like that inflicted by the U.S. bombing raids in neighboring Afghanistan.

The e-mail added a warning to other U.S. citizens in Pakistan: “now we are thirsty for the blood of another American. When US attacked Afghanistan and killed so many people they did not think about this that there would be no place for Americans outside America. Now they must leave Pakistan because we will kill more Americans as we find them.”

Hope emerged Friday evening when various reports surfaced of a demand for a $2-million ransom for Pearl’s freedom. But as the night wore on, those reports began to unravel. The U.S. Consulate in Karachi, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, and the inspector general of police in Sindh province, where Karachi is located, all denied reports that they had received such a call.

“The Pakistani authorities are taking it seriously, and they are in the process of searching graveyards to assess its validity,” U.S. Consulate spokesman Lonnie Kelley said of the e-mail.

The Wall Street Journal said in a statement: “We have seen the latest reports, and we remain hopeful that they are not true.”

But an editor at the Wall Street Journal said the newspaper fears that the e-mail saying Pearl had been killed is “credible.”

Mark Wentworth, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, said he had no knowledge of a report that an e-mail ransom note was sent to the mission there. “The only e-mail I’ve seen is the one sent to various news organizations claiming he is dead,” Wentworth said. “There are a lot of rumors around, and we’re working with Pakistani authorities to try to nail them down.”

In Karachi, Inspector General Syed Kamel Shah said that he had been unable to confirm any ransom demand but that his department was continuing to investigate the reports.

“We’re investigating vigorously,” Shah said.

In Washington, where the case has risen steadily on the foreign policy agenda, officials at the White House and State Department said U.S. officials continued working with Pakistani authorities to find Pearl but had no progress to report late Friday afternoon.

CIA counter-terrorism experts examined the new e-mail “to see if they can determine if it’s authentic,” one official said.

He noted that the message had fewer misspellings and other errors than the previous e-mails. “So there are some inconsistencies,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. “It’s kind of confusing. It’s difficult to say if it’s a hoax or not.”

Hours before the discovery of the latest e-mail, President Bush had promised a dogged pursuit of any leads in the case.

“We are working with the Pakistan government to chase down any leads possible--for example, trying to follow the trail of the e-mails that have been sent, with the sole purpose of saving this man, of finding him and rescuing him,” Bush said during a White House appearance with Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Dubbing themselves the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, Pearl’s captors demanded the release of all Pakistani citizens held by U.S. troops at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, as well as the release of the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan.

Before the latest e-mail became public, frustration was evident among Pakistani officials at the kidnappers’ unorthodox methods, including their steadfast reclusion in cyberspace, where they masked the route and origin of their e-mails, using screen names such as “kidnapperguy” and “strangepeoples.”

“We’re keeping the Americans informed of our progress, but we’re not making much headway,” acknowledged a senior Pakistani military source, who declined to be identified. “These are smart people. Long before we hear from them, they are spreading their information to the international media. They refused to get into any personal or telephone contact with us or anyone else.”

Expanded police questioning of known militant group leaders and criminals in Karachi has produced little to go on, Interior Ministry officials said.

Terrorism experts offered their own theories.

“My own mind is the government has not made up its mind which group it is and it’s very embarrassed,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, an expert on terrorist organizations and director of the Area Studies Center at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

Rais speculated that the so-called National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, a name that has appeared only in the first e-mail message from the kidnappers, is “not a legitimate organization” but could be a surviving cell of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network, perhaps combined with a sectarian group operating in Karachi.

Rais said the captors were apparently looking to send a message to the U.S. and to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that the network is still alive and capable of attacks on American interests, despite the U.S. military campaign and Musharraf’s crackdown on Islamic extremist groups. The captors’ shifting agenda is just a “pretext to present themselves as a patriotic element” and portray Musharraf as a lackey to U.S. interests in the region, Rais said.

Among the top local suspects is a radical element within the Mohajir Quami Movement, also known as the Muttahida Quami Movement. It is an Indian Muslim migrant group well funded by money it extorts from Karachi business interests.

Paul Rogers, a social scientist at the University of Bradford in Britain who studies the changing nature of political violence, said the kidnappers’ method of e-mailing demands yet never opening a direct negotiation channel is unusual.

“It looks as though it’s something new,” he said in a telephone interview Friday. “I’ve seen no parallel.”

Pakistani Foreign Affairs Minister Abdus Sattar said his government had information linking suspects in the kidnapping with “certain individuals occupying important positions in the Indian government.”

India responded by demanding that he name the officials, and called the allegation a “grand charade.”

*

Times staff writers Bob Drogin and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.