The U.S. State Department confirmed on Thursday, 21st, that kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was killed by his captors. 

A SENIOR government official told Reuters that President Pervez Musharraf’s regime had discussed releasing the tape but decided it was too barbaric to air.

The official told Reuters the videotape, sent by the radical Islamic gang suspected of kidnapping Pearl to a newspaper worker who handed it to authorities, showed the reporter’s severed head in its last frame.

Earlier parts of the brief tape showed Pearl’s throat being cut from behind while he was still talking to the camera.  “It was discussed at the most senior level whether to release this video to television channels, but finally it was decided that even foreign television channels would not be able to show such gruesome scenes,” the official said.  “The last scene shows Pearl’s head separated from his body.”

However different sources have provided conflicting accounts of what appears on the tape. 

According to a report in the New York Times on Saturday, people “with detailed knowledge” of a videotape of Pearl’s murder said it showed that he had apparently been unconscious when his throat was cut.

LARGER CONSPIRACY?
Meanwhile, Pakistani authorities believe Pearl’s murder may be part of a larger terrorist scheme to destabilize the country following Musharraf’s pledge to rid Pakistan of Muslim extremism in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack in the United States.

The government warned foreign missions, embassies and dignitaries to boost their security, the Interior Ministry officials said, adding that attacks on U.S. interests in Pakistan cannot be ruled out. 

According to the New York Times, some political parties that were banned when Musharraf took power in a 1999 coup accused his government of failing to prevent Pearl’s death by allowing a general breakdown in security. 

The Pakistan People’s Party, led by former prime minister Benazir Bhutto said in a statement that “the murder of Daniel Pearl could be a sign of worse to come.”

Top Pakistani investigators told Reuters on Saturday that they had received threatening calls from people using Pearl’s mobile phone a day before U.S. officials received a video showing his killing.

A source close to the investigation said Saturday that three senior officials investigating Pearl’s abduction received a number of calls on Feb. 20 warning them of “dire consequences” if they did not stop chasing them. 

The source said before receiving the calls investigators had stepped up their search, fanning out across the largely lawless Northwest Frontier and Baluchistan Provinces, which border Afghanistan, as well as central Punjab province.

“They told the investigators how many children each one of them have, when they go to school, which mode of transport they use for going to school and returning back home and where their families go for shopping,” the source said.

“They had very minute and precise information about the activities of their family members,” the source said. “The investigators were alarmed and informed the interior minister (Moinhuddin Haider).”

On Friday, Musharraf pledged to apprehend “each and every one of the gang of terrorists” involved in Pearl’s murder. The State Department praised Musharraf’s handling of the case, but U.S. officials told NBC News that they could not rule out the possibility that Pakistani security officials were involved.

BUSH CONFERS WITH MUSHARRAF
Musharraf expressed his “profound grief” over the killing and ordered security forces “to apprehend each and every member of the gang of terrorists involved in this gruesome murder.”

President Bush, who called Pearl’s killing a “criminal, barbaric act” Thursday, spoke with Musharraf early Friday as he returned home from a five-day trip to Asia.

Lonnie Kelley, public affairs officer at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, said, “Both Pakistan and U.S. investigators have identified the perpetrators behind the crime.” 

Four people had been arrested and charged in the case previously, including Islamic militant Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, who said during a court hearing that he had engineered Pearl’s abduction to protest Pakistan’s alliance with the United States’ post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism.

Sheikh is “clearly right in the middle of this,” the senior U.S. official told NBC News, adding, however, that U.S. officials did not have a clear idea of the quality of the evidence against him. It also was unclear whether Sheikh knew where Pearl was being held and could have been more helpful before he was killed.

The senior U.S. official who spoke to NBC News, meanwhile, noted persistent rumors of involvement by members of Pakistan’s ISI security force and said the United States could not rule out the possibility that “elements” of the ISI were involved. 

The ISI supported the militant Islamic Taliban rulers of Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Musharraf reversed Pakistan’s policy of support for the Taliban under heavy U.S. diplomatic pressure, and Musharraf was widely reported to have removed several senior ISI officials who dissented from the decision. 

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher refused Friday to address the question of ISI involvement, saying he would not speculate on what every employee of a foreign governmental organization “might do.”

Boucher told reporters at the State Department’s daily news briefing in Washington that the U.S. government had “had excellent cooperation” from Pakistan. “We expect that to continue,” he said. 

LURED INTO A TRAP?
Pearl was abducted Jan. 23 in Karachi after arranging to interview the leader of a radical Muslim faction with purported ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network and to Richard Reid, who was arrested on a Paris-to-Miami flight with explosives in his shoes.

Pakistani officials said there were indications that Pearl had been lured into a trap by false information. 

Four days after Pearl disappeared, an e-mail sent to Pakistani and international media showed photos of him in captivity and demanded that the United States repatriate Pakistanis captured in Afghanistan and detained at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A second e-mail sent Jan. 30 said Pearl would be killed in 24 hours. That was the last known message from his captors.

The announcement of Pearl’s death crushed the hopes of his colleagues and his pregnant wife, Mariane, who had pleaded for his safe return. 

Mariane Pearl was told of his death in Karachi, where she had been staying while awaiting word on her husband’s fate, said Steve Goldstein, a vice president of Dow Jones & Co., the owner of the Journal. In the weeks since her husband’s capture, Mariane Pearl, a freelance journalist, had pleaded for his freedom and offered herself in his place. 

The Journal released a statement Friday from Mariane Pearl expressing “my gratitude to all of the people throughout the world who have given Danny and me support and encouragement.”

“From this act of barbarism, terrorists expect all of us to bow our heads and retreat as victims forever threatened by their ruthlessness,” she said. “What terrorists forget is that they may seize the life of an innocent man or the lives of many innocent people as they did on Sept. 11, but they cannot claim the spirit or faith of individual human beings.”