Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often known by his initials KSM, is a Pakistani terrorist, mechanical engineer and the former Head of Propaganda for al-Qaeda. He is currently held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under terrorism-related charges. He was named as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report.
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.
Indian Airlines Flight 814, commonly known as IC 814, was an Indian Airlines Airbus A300 en route from Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal, to Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, India, on Friday, 24 December 1999, when it was hijacked and was flown to several locations before landing in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Paul Marshall Johnson Jr. was an American helicopter engineer who lived in Saudi Arabia. In 2004, he was taken hostage by militants and his murder was recorded on video tape.
On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists took control of four commercial aircraft and used them as suicide weapons in a series of four coordinated acts of terrorism to strike the World Trade Center in New York City, The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and an additional target in Washington, D.C. Two aircraft hit the World Trade Center while the third hit the Pentagon. A fourth plane did not arrive at its target, but crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. The intended target is believed to have been the United States Capitol. As a result, 2,977 victims were killed, making it the deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil, exceeding Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, which killed 2,335 members of the United States Armed Forces and 68 civilians. The effort was carefully planned by al-Qaeda, which sent 19 terrorists to take over Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 aircraft, operated by American Airlines and United Airlines.
Jaish-e-Mohammed is a Pakistan-based Deobandi Jihadist terrorist group active in Kashmir. The group's primary motive is to separate Kashmir from India and merge it into Pakistan.
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.
A beheading video is a video which depicts a live murder in which a hostage or victim is shown to be graphically decapitated, or the head is displayed in the aftermath. Such videos are typically distributed mostly through the Internet, and are often employed by groups seeking to instill shock or terror into a population. Although beheading has been a widely employed public execution method since the ancient Greeks and Romans, videos of this type only began to arise in 2002 with the beheading of Daniel Pearl and the growth of the Internet in the Information Age, which allowed groups to anonymously publish these videos for public consumption. The beheadings shown in these videos are usually not performed in a "classical" method – decapitating a victim quickly with a blow from a sword or axe – but by the relatively slow and torturous process of slicing and sawing the victim's neck, while still alive, with a knife.
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.
A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Daniel Pearl (2003) is a memoir by Mariane Pearl, a freelance French journalist. She covers the 2002 kidnapping and murder by terrorists in Pakistan of her late husband Daniel Pearl, an American journalist with The Wall Street Journal.
Mubarak Ali Shah Gillani was a Pakistani Sufi religious leader in the United States. A member of the Qadiriyya tariqa, he was the founder of The Muslims of America (MOA) and also founded the International Qur'anic Open University.
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.
The 1994 kidnappings of western tourists in India were the abductions of four foreign tourists in Delhi, India, between 29 September and 20 October 1994, by terrorists. The kidnappings were perpetrated by the anti-Indian terrorist group Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA), under the pseudonym of Al-Hadid, led by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh to secure the release of HuA leaders. Sheikh was caught and ultimately imprisoned at the Tihar Jail in Delhi. The abductees included three British citizens, Myles Croston, Paul Rideout, and Rhys Partridge, and one American, Béla Nuss; all of them were rescued unharmed by the police.
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.
The Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act requires the United States Department of State to expand its scrutiny of news media intimidation and freedom of the press restrictions during its annual report on human rights in each country. Signed into law by President Obama on May 17, 2010, the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act is named in honor of former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, just four months after the September 11 attacks. The act amends the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to include provisions to spotlight governments that seek to silence any media opposition by calling upon the Secretary of State to greatly expand the examination of the status of freedom of the press worldwide in the State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. As such, the legislation requires that the State Department identify countries in which there were violations of press freedom, determine whether the government authorities of those countries participate in, facilitate, or condone the violations, and report such actions to preserve the safety and independence of the media and ensure the prosecution of individuals who attack journalists.
This is a list of known foreign hostages in Pakistan.
Extremist Salafi jihadist groups such as ISIS and Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad have used beheading as a method of killing captives. Since 2002, ISIS have circulated beheading videos as a form of terror and propaganda. Their actions have been condemned by militant and other terrorist groups, as well as by mainstream Islamic scholars and organizations.
