Kidnapped.(kidnapping of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan)

So much anguish and sadness and fear have been visited upon so many people since September 11th -- the thousands murdered that morning and killed or maimed since, the hundreds of thousands grieved or uprooted, the millions upon millions filled with a new kind of dread -- that the case of Daniel Pearl adds but little to the dismal accounting. Yet it chills all the same. Pearl is -- or was (at this writing, we do not know if he is alive or dead) -- the South Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. On January 23rd, in Karachi, he was abducted in front of a restaurant where he had gone to meet someone who had promised to arrange an interview with the leader of a terrorist splinter group. After three days of silence, American and Pakistani journalists began to receive e-mails of a grotesque character. Their author or authors used a sickeningly "clever," hard-to-trace return address (kidnapperguy@hotmail.com); purported to represent an unknown but grandiosely titled organization (the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty); made demands, of a kind that no news organization could fulfill and no government should or would; threatened to kill Pearl within twenty-four hours, or within forty-eight hours; and enclosed a series of photographs, showing Pearl with his wrists chained, with a pistol pointed at his head, with a copy of a newspaper published after he was seized. A few days of this; then more e-mails, believed to be hoaxes, including one saying that Pearl had been killed; then silence, again. Toward the end of last week, the police in Pakistan identified, as the chief fugitive, a British-born son of Pakistani immigrants named Omar Saeed, who is prominent in Jaish-e-Mohammed, one of the terrorist groups banned last month by General Pervez Musharraf. If, as the police say, Saeed wrote the e-mails, then he did so in semiliterate disguise ("we give all amreekan journlists 3 days to get out of pakstan," etc.), for he was educated at private schools in England and at the London School of Economics.

Amid the suffering of the many it is often the one who captures the imagination. The details of Daniel Pearl's life strike the same chord as those lives memorialized by the Times in its "Portraits of Grief" pages: he spent many evenings playing bluegrass on the electric fiddle in small saloons when he was stationed in Washington; his friends describe him as endearingly absent-minded; he is witty and, at thirty-eight, boyish and scholarly-looking, like a grownup Harry Potter. His wife, Mariane, who was in Karachi with him, is six months pregnant with their first child. He has written sympathetically about the Islamic world. Perhaps these things were unknown to his kidnappers. Perhaps ...