Posted 8:27 PM by Blah blah

Moment of silence. I feel sad. Sorry for Mr. Pearl's wife and friends. He sounds like such a fantastic and talented guy. And I grieve with his Wall St. Journal colleagues. This must have been especially gut-wrenching to write. Here's a series of stories on Mr. Pearl, chronicling the tragedy, from the South Asian Journalists Association. Here's a selection of Mr. Pearl's articles for the front page of the newspaper.

Reporter Daniel Pearl Is Dead, Killed by His Captors in Pakistan (Wall St. Journal):
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The abduction and death mean the Journal has lost one of its premier foreign correspondents, who was noted for his lively eye for detail and his gift for explaining the human side of complex international problems. Paradoxically, though he appears to have suffered at the hands of Islamic militants angry at the West, he was particularly sensitive to sentiments in the Islamic world and committed to explaining them to his readers in the West....

"A musician, a writer, a storyteller and a bridge-builder, he was a walking sunshine of truth, humor, friendship and compassion. We grieve with the many who have known him in his life and we weep for a world that must reckon with his death."...

Mr. Pearl was a 12-year veteran of the Journal, working in Atlanta, Washington, London and Paris before moving to Bombay to cover South Asia two years ago. For much of the last six years of his journalistic life, he dedicated himself to explaining the Arab and Islamic worlds to Wall Street Journal readers.

Born in Princeton, N.J., Mr. Pearl graduated in 1985 from Stanford University. Before joining the Journal in 1990, Mr. Pearl worked for several newspapers in Massachusetts, once winning an American Planning Association Award for a five-part series on land use.

A skeptic of all institutions, from big government to big business, Mr. Pearl often seemed as much at home with his violin, playing bluegrass music, as he was filing stories as a top reporter at a newspaper.

He was always a music man, from classical to blues to country to bluegrass to rock 'n' roll. As lead violinist in an Atlanta band called The Ottoman Empire, Mr. Pearl received the thrill of his musical life in 1993 when his band opened for The Kinks at an Atlanta club. His music collection stretched from rhythm and blues musicians like Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack to salsa musicians like La India.

Mr. Pearl tended to pick up strays. At dinner parties in London, where he lived for three years, Mr. Pearl was known for last-minute phone calls to hosts, asking if he could bring additional guests. One year, he invited some people he met on the subway to the staff Thanksgiving dinner. "One thing about Danny: You invite him for dinner, you buy for 10 people," says Tom Jennings, a longtime friend. Mr. Jennings, a freelance journalist in New York, also recalls: "This was the man who wrote a song for my son days before his birth, encouraging him into the world. The song was called, 'The World Is Not a Bad Place.'"

He liked to cook. While working in the Atlanta bureau, Mr. Pearl received a bread maker from his mother for his birthday. For two years after that, he experimented with sometimes outlandish recipes. Another favored dish was stuffed grape leaves, which he trotted out when friends came to cry on his shoulder or to look for counsel or comfort.

He liked to shop, sometimes spending hours trolling offbeat shops in London's Covent Garden for the perfect orange shirt -- though he often walked around the Journal offices without shoes. Mr. Pearl, who attracted women by the droves, met Mariane at a party in Paris in 1998, and immediately announced that he had fallen in love.

The two were married in August 1999. They originally planned to get married in September but pushed up the date because Mariane's mother was dying of cancer. She held herself upright to walk her daughter down the aisle but was too sick to sit through the wedding reception. So it was from an upstairs window that she listened as her new son-in-law played Bach for her from below.

In Mr. Pearl, the Journal found the perfect reporter: highly individual, a skeptic, but one with an engaged eye and an open mind for stories big and small. In the Atlanta office, where he started his Journal career, he quickly showed he was a natural at spotting the quirky story. In February 1993, he got a story on the front page about a nine-year-old beauty queen who got stripped of her crown for singing Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy-Breaky Heart" at two dueling pageants. "She cannot perform as Little Miss Bookcase on Saturday, then Little Miss Georgia on Sunday," Mr. Pearl quoted one pageant executive as saying....

Beloved by his colleagues at the Journal, Mr. Pearl's sense of humor reared at odd times. During a friendly turf battle over a Pakistan trade story that a colleague in the Washington bureau was writing, Mr. Pearl kept quiet until after the story appeared in the paper. The day it appeared, his colleague wrote to apologize for not consulting him on the story first. Mr. Pearl replied with the following e-mail: "grumble. grumble, grumble. grumble grumble." He added that he actually owed the reporter an apology for not alerting her to a previous story.

The e-mail continued, "Okay, clean slate, but let me say this: I'm going to Pakistan Saturday, and from that point on, anybody who types the word Pakistan, Pakistani, Paki, Pak, Coldpak or Backpak without consulting me stands NO CHANCE AT ALL of getting illicit Cipro."

It was signed, "Danny."
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The main suspect in Mr. Pearl's kidnapping was arrested on Tuesday in Lahore, Pakistan. He is Sheik Omar Saeed. The FBI is exploring leads that Saeed could have been involved in the transfer of $100,000 to Mohammad Atta, one of the hijackers in the September 11 attacks. In 1994, Saeed was in prison and wrote a 35 page diary. Here are excerpts: 1) Diary of a Terrorist, from Harper's magazine. 2) The Indian Express.

By Trevor Matthews, a journalist for The Guardian: Daniel Pearl's kidnapper nearly got me too.