Daniel Pearl

Lore & Background

Daniel Pearl was born on October 10, 1963, in Princeton, New Jersey, to Judea Pearl and Ruth Pearl. His father is an Israeli-American of Polish Jewish descent, and his mother was an Iraqi Jew. The family moved to Encino, Los Angeles, when his father took a position at UCLA as professor of computer science and statistics. Pearl attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, graduating with a B.A. in Communication, and was a co-founder of the student newspaper the Stanford Commentator.

Journalism career

He started his professional journalism career at the North Adams Transcript and The Berkshire Eagle, then moved to the San Francisco Business Times. In 1990, he joined The Wall Street Journal in Atlanta, later moving to Washington, D.C., to cover telecommunications, then to London in 1996 and Paris in 1999. In Paris, he met and married French journalist Mariane van Neyenhoff in 1999.

South Asia and murder

Their son, Adam Daniel Pearl, was born on May 28, 2002, four months after Pearl's abduction and death. Pearl became Southeast Asia bureau chief and settled in Mumbai, India, traveling to Karachi, Pakistan, to report on the war on terror following the September 11 attacks. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped near the Hotel Metropole in Karachi at 7:00 p.m. while on his way to what he thought was an interview with Mubarak Ali Gilani.

Death

His captors released a video titled "The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl," lasting 3 minutes and 36 seconds, in which Pearl states he is Jewish and condemns American foreign policy. His throat is slit and his head severed. On May 16, his severed head and decomposed body were found cut into ten pieces in a shallow grave at Gadap, about 30 miles north of Karachi. Abdul Sattar Edhi collected the body parts and helped return them to the United States, where Pearl was interred in Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles.