structural:reformatting
Daniel Pearl was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped by Islamist militants while he was on his way to what he had expected would be an interview with Pakistani religious cleric Mubarak Ali Gilani in the city of Karachi. 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. A few days after his disappearance, Pearl's captors released a video in which he is recorded condemning American foreign policy and repeatedly telling the camera that he and his family are Jewish and have visited Israel, following which his throat is slit and his head severed from his body. Before killing Pearl, the captors had issued an ultimatum to the United States government, namely including the demands that all Pakistani terrorists be freed from American prisons and that the United States move forward with a halted shipment of F-16s for the Pakistani government. Gilani has refuted allegations of involvement with Jamaat ul-Fuqra and Pearl's killing. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British citizen of Pakistani origin, was arrested by Pakistani authorities and sentenced to death in July 2002 for the execution, but his conviction was overturned by a Pakistani court in 2020. Sheikh had previously been arrested by Indian authorities for his involvement in the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists in India, and is also an affiliate of Jaish-e-Mohammed and al-Qaeda, among other armed jihadist organizations.