who killed daniel pearl?

It was almost a year and a half ago that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was killed in Pakistan, a country that the Administration counted as an ally in its declared war on terror. The official version of Pearl’s death is that he was due to meet a man who may have inspired Richard Reid to become the shoe-bomber. Pearl was kidnapped at the meeting, and the man who was subsequently arrested for the crime turned out to be Omar Sheikh.

In an explosive new book (Qui a Tue Daniel Pearl?) published in France this week, Bernard-Henry Levy, the widely respected French philosopher and writer, draws portraits of Pearl and Sheikh. Both had double nationalities: Israeli-American for Daniel Pearl, and Pakistani-British for Omar Sheikh. Both had middle class childhoods. Both went to very prestigious schools. So how did they end up on opposite ends of this conflict? In addition to the human side of this conflict, Bernard-Henry Levy also followed the facts. He spent a year retracing Pearl’s itinerary in Pakistan. His findings? That Omar Sheikh worked for the ISI, Pakistan’s secret service, and that Daniel Pearl was killed because he was about to uncover links between the ISI and Al-Qaeda, links which could have included the transfer of nuclear weapons.

The book is already in best-seller lists in France. But fear not, dear anglophile reader. It will be published in the United States and Britain by Melville House books in just a few months. There’s even a blurb about it in the NY Post.