Daniel Pearl

Daniel Pearl was born in 1963 in Princeton

Daniel Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1963. His father is computer scientist Judea Pearl and his mother was Ruth Pearl, an Iraqi Jew. The family moved to Encino in Los Angeles when his father joined the University of California, Los Angeles.

He studied communication at Stanford University from 1981 to 1985. There he co-founded a student newspaper and reported for the campus radio station. He held Israeli citizenship in addition to his American citizenship.

He began his career at newspapers in western Massachusetts and later at the San Francisco Business Times. In 1990 he joined The Wall Street Journal in Atlanta, then worked in its bureaus in Washington, London and Paris. His reporting covered the wars in the Balkans and the American missile strike in Khartoum.

In 1999 he married French journalist Mariane van Neyenhoff, and the couple later settled in Mumbai, where he headed a regional bureau of the newspaper. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped in Karachi while researching links between Richard Reid and al-Qaeda. His captors killed him, and their video of the killing was released on February 21, 2002.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was sentenced to death in Pakistan in 2002, but a Pakistani court overturned his conviction in 2020. His son Adam was born in Paris on May 28, 2002. A foundation in his name was set up, and in 2013 an institute for international journalism named after him opened in Herzliya.