Missing US reporter - in chains with a gun to his head

Disturbing photographs released yesterday showed an American journalist who has been missing in Pakistan for nearly a week held in chains and at gunpoint by his kidnappers.

Daniel Pearl, 38, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, is shown sitting on the floor, his head bowed. One of his kidnappers, dressed in white, holds a fist of his hair in one hand and points a gun at the back of his head with the other. Pearl's hands are stretched out in front of him, in chains.

Another shot shows him looking at the camera, unshaven and without his glasses. He holds up what appears to be a copy of last Thursday's edition of the Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper. Pearl went missing a day earlier.

The photographs were sent to several American newspapers in an email. The Wall Street Journal quoted the message as saying Pearl was being held "in very inhumane circumstances quite similar in fact to the way Pakistanis and nationals of other sovereign countries are being kept in Cuba by the American army".

His kidnappers claimed to be members of an unknown organisation, the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. The email was sent under the name "kidnapperguy".

Pakistani police said yesterday that they suspected that Islamist militants were responsible. Police sources said they believed the journalist might have been taken by Harkat ul-Mojahedin, a militant organisation fighting in Kashmir which is known to have links with Osama bin Laden.

Another police officer in Lahore said he thought Pearl had been trying to meet the head of a fundamentalist Sunni militant group, al-Fuqra, which was founded in New York 20 years ago by a Pakistani cleric. Five militants were arrested in Lahore at the weekend but later released.

"We will take everything seriously. We don't leave anything to chance; we have picked up every threat that's come about," said Brigadier Mukhtar Ahmed, the interior secretary for southern Sind province. "We have had some success."

Pearl, who is based in Bombay, went missing in Karachi while researching a story about al-Qaida links in Pakistan. Karachi has a reputation for violence: several Americans have been killed in the city over the past decade.

Steven Goldstein, a vice-president of Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal, said the paper had received no direct communication from the group which claimed to be holding the journalist.

In the email Pearl's captors said the prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be kept in better conditions and given access to lawyers and to their families.

They also demanded that Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Islamabad who is one of the most senior figures from the regime in American custody, should be handed back to Pakistan. They said a batch of F-16 fighter jets bought by Pakistan from the Americans in the 1980s and never delivered should be released.

Pearl was in Karachi with his wife, Mariane, who is also a journalist and is expecting the couple's first child in May. He has worked for the Wall Street Journal for 12 years in Atlanta, Washington and London before moving to Bombay.