Daniel Pearl was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped by Islamist militants while he was on his way to what he had expected would be an interview with Pakistani religious cleric Mubarak Ali Gilani in the city of Karachi. Pearl had moved to Mumbai, India, upon taking up a regional posting by his newspaper and later entered Pakistan to cover the War on Terror, which was launched by the United States in response to the September 11 attacks in 2001. At the time of his abduction, he had been investigating the alleged links between British citizen Richard Reid and al-Qaeda; Reid had reportedly completed his training at a facility owned by Gilani, who had been accused by the United States of being affiliated with the Pakistani terrorist organization Jamaat ul-Fuqra.
The Daniel Pearl Foundation is a foundation based in the United States. The foundation was formed by his parents Ruth and Judea Pearl after musician and Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002. The organization's mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music, and innovative communications.
Bernard-Henri Georges Lévy is a French public intellectual. Often referred to in France simply as BHL, he was one of the leaders of the "Nouveaux Philosophes" movement in 1976. His opinions, political activism and publications have also been the subject of several controversies over the years.
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks. He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning". He is the author of several books, including the technical Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, and The Book of Why, a book on causality aimed at the general public.
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American.
Asra Quratulain Nomani is an Indian American journalist and author. Born in India to Muslim parents, she earned a BA from West Virginia University in liberal arts in 1986 and an MA from the American University in international communications in 1990. She subsequently worked as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal with her colleague Daniel Pearl in Pakistan post-9/11. Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by Islamist terrorists while following an investigative lead. Nomani later became the co-director of the Pearl Project, a faculty-student investigative-reporting project which has looked into Pearl's murder.
Archana Panjabi is a British-American actress. She has had various roles in both UK and US television including as Maya Roy in Life on Mars (2006–07), Nas Kamal in Blindspot, Kendra Malley in Departure (2019–present), and Kalinda Sharma in The Good Wife (2009–15). Her work in the latter earned her a Primetime Emmy Award in 2010 and an NAACP Image Award in 2012, as well as two further Emmy nominations, one Golden Globe nomination, and three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations shared with the cast. Panjabi is the first Asian actor to win a Primetime Emmy for acting. Other notable roles include Meenah Khan in East Is East (1999), Pinky Bhamra in Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Yasmin Husseini in Yasmin (2004), and Asra Nomani in A Mighty Heart (2007).
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is a British Pakistani terrorist. He became a member of the Islamist jihadist group Harkat-ul-Ansar or Harkat-ul-Mujahideen in the 1990s, and later of Jaish-e-Mohammed and was closely associated with Al-Qaeda.
A Mighty Heart is a 2007 American drama film directed by Michael Winterbottom from a screenplay by John Orloff. It is based on the 2003 memoir of the same name by Mariane Pearl.
Matiur Rehman Ali Muhammad was a Pakistani militant who had been identified as al-Qaeda's planning director and was the chief operational commander of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and was closely associated with Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami. Pakistani police identified him as being involved in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He was designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee of the Security Council in 2011.
Mariane van Neyenhoff Pearl is a French freelance journalist and a former reporter and columnist for Glamour magazine. She is the widow of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist who was the South Asia Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal, who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002, during the early months of the United States' War on Terror. Pearl published a memoir, A Mighty Heart (2003), about her husband and his life. It was adapted as a film of the same name, released in 2007.
Six western tourists and their two guides were kidnapped in the Liddarwat area of Pahalgam in the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir, India on 4 July 1995 by forty militants from the Kashmiri Islamist militant organisation Harkat-ul-Ansar, under the pseudonym of Al-Faran, in order to secure the release of Harkat leader Masood Azhar and other militants.
Saud Memon was a Pakistani businessman from Karachi dealing in yarn and textiles. Memon was said to own the Al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi where American journalist Daniel Pearl was killed. Memon was wanted by law-enforcement agencies in the Pearl case for supposedly providing the place where Pearl was beheaded and subsequently buried. However, Memon was never formally charged.
John Orloff is an American screenwriter, television creator, and producer.
Farah Nisa Stockman is an American journalist who has worked for The Boston Globe and is currently employed by The New York Times. In 2016, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
Steve LeVine is a journalist. He writes The Electric, a new publication on batteries, electric vehicles, and their impact on society, cities and geopolitics. He is a senior fellow on the Foresight, Strategy and Risk Initiative at the Atlantic Council and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where he teaches energy security in the graduate-level Security Studies Program. Previously, he was a foreign correspondent for eighteen years in the former Soviet Union, Pakistan and the Philippines, for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times and Newsweek. He formerly wrote Future, a newsletter at Axios, and The Oil and the Glory, a blog on energy and geopolitics at Foreign Policy magazine. LeVine is married to Nurilda Nurlybayeva and has two daughters. He has published three books: The Oil and the Glory (2007) which tells the story of the struggle for fortune, glory and power on the Caspian Sea; Putin's Labyrinth (2008), a profile of Russia through the life and death of a half-dozen Russians; and The Powerhouse, on the geopolitics of advanced batteries, which was long-listed for the Financial Times-McKinsey 2015 Business Book of the Year.
Umar Cheema is an investigative reporter for the Pakistani newspaper The News. In 2008, he won a Daniel Pearl Journalism Fellowship, becoming the first Pearl fellow to work at The New York Times.
Nadine Epstein an American journalist and author.
Baitul Mukarram Mosque is a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan. It is located in Block 8 Gulshan e Iqbal, Karachi. It is near Urdu University and Expo Center Karachi.
Sarah Crichton is an American writer, editor and publisher, who serves as editor-at-large at Henry Holt and Company since 2023, having previously served as its editor-in-chief from 2020 to 2023. She previously served as publisher at Little, Brown & Company from 1996 to 2001, and as publisher of her eponymous imprint, Sarah Crichton Books, at Farrar, Straus & Giroux from 2004 till 2019.
