Part of the This Day in Islamic Terrorism series.
On January 23, 2002, on his way to what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani at the Village restaurant in Karachi, Pearl was kidnapped by a militant group calling itself The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.
This group claimed Pearl was a CIA agent and — using the e-mail address — sent the United States a range of demands, including the freeing of all Pakistani terror detainees, and the release of a halted U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government.
The message read:
This group claimed Pearl was a CIA agent and — using the e-mail address — sent the United States a range of demands, including the freeing of all Pakistani terror detainees, and the release of a halted U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government.
The message read:
We give you one more day if America will not meet our demands we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.
Photos of Pearl handcuffed with a gun at his head and holding up a newspaper were attached. There was no response to pleas from Pearl's editor, and from his wife Mariane.
Nine days later, Pearl was murdered and beheaded. Pearl's body was found cut into ten pieces and buried in a shallow grave in the outskirts of Karachi on May 16. When the police found his remains, Abdul Sattar Edhi arrived promptly on the scene, personally collected all ten body parts, and took them to the morgue; then his body was returned to the United States and he was interred in the Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
(Although foul play was obvious, no autopsy was needed or performed. The subsequent video made the sequence of events clear. Years later, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confessed to cutting off Pearl's head, but didn't state whether he had cut his throat: it is likely that one person did both.)
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was one of the terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay.