Little Progress in Pearl Case

As the investigation crawled along in its third week, the case of kidnapped Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl showed little signs of progress Sunday beyond the realms of speculation and half-truths.

Pearl, 38, the Journal’s South Asia correspondent, disappeared Jan. 23 in the Pakistani port city of Karachi en route to what he believed was an interview with the leader of an Islamic extremist group.

Subsequently, two e-mailed screeds against the U.S. announced that he was being held hostage by a hitherto unknown group dubbed the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, which demanded the release of Pakistanis captured by American forces in Afghanistan.

Since then, there have been reports of his death, denials and rumors of his release.

A top investigator conceded Sunday that he was stumped by the silence from the leading suspect, Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born Pakistani product of English private schools and a hard-core Islamic jihad ideology picked up in the Balkans and the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

The last authorities heard of Sheikh was early last week, in a brief cell phone conversation he had with an aunt who lives in the eastern city of Lahore while police, who have held the woman under virtual house arrest, tried to trace the call.

“It was hardly a minute long, and then he closed off the phone,” said Syed Kamel Shah, inspector general of police in Sindh province, where Karachi is located. “He shut it off, and we couldn’t find him. She wanted him to surrender. She said, ‘The police have reached us, so if you have this person, you better let him go.’ ”

The sudden disconnection now echoes for investigators, who managed to determine that Sheikh had moved north from Karachi into heavily populated central Punjab province. They describe him as clever and organized, with a long resume of kidnappings for Muslim causes and ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. He was sufficiently important to Al Qaeda that terrorists hijacked a passenger jet to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1999 to win his release from an Indian jail.

While Sheikh apparently walks free in Punjab or elsewhere, Pearl is believed to be alive and captive in Karachi, Shah said.

“We’re not 100% sure he’s in Karachi--he could have been moved out--but there’s more chance he’s in Karachi,” Shah said.

“Had it been otherwise, it would’ve become apparent,” he added of the assumption that Pearl is alive. “They would like to publicize it.”

One thing is certain: Pearl did not sneak out of the country under cover of darkness, as some of the local press would have it.

A report in the English-language Dawn newspaper said a Daniel Pearl was ticketed to fly to London from Islamabad, the capital, on Friday, and a subsequent report told in conspiratorial tones of a mysterious cancellation of that ticket. The Urdu-language press has been even more direct in suggesting that Pearl has long since left the country.

It turns out that British citizen Damien Pearl did indeed reserve a Friday flight, canceled it and then flew home Saturday. His name had been wrongly entered as Daniel Pearl.

“It was spelled wrong,” explained Hassan Shahzad, manager of Waqas Travel in Islamabad, which was visited by intelligence officials and police shortly after the Dawn report was published.

“He said ‘Damien Pearl’ and the clerk wrote ‘Daniel Pearl,’ ” Shahzad said. “I knew about Daniel Pearl, but it said clearly he was from the U.K. On Friday, he came in and showed his passport, and we changed the ticket.”

Presumably, Damien Pearl is safe in London. As for Daniel Pearl, Shah said he expected a break in the case within several days, based on pressure on Sheikh’s family and the arrest last week of three men who say they sent the e-mails, along with electronic photographs, at Sheikh’s behest.

“We are hopeful our efforts will bear fruit,” Shah said. “It’s difficult to predict, but maybe in a couple of days.”