Pearl Killed 'for Finding Terror Links'

The American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan because he uncovered links between the British terrorist Richard Reid and the Pakistani secret service, according to an investigation by the French philosopher and author Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Lévy's book Who Killed Daniel Pearl? traces the Wall Street Journal correspondent's last investigation after he was persuaded to go to Pakistan by a London-born double agent, Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Sheikh has since been sentenced to death in Pakistan for overseeing the murder, in which the reporter's body was cut into 10 pieces.

Lévy spent several weeks in Pakistan and described it as "the most delinquent of delinquent nations". He said Muslims such as Reid who were linked to al-Qaida were being manipulated by "the most violent and most anti-American faction" inside the Pakistani intelligence service.

Sheikh, a London School of Economics graduate, reportedly invited Pearl, who was then in India, to visit him in Pakistan as part of an inquiry into the background of Reid.

Reid is now in prison in the US after trying to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami.

Lévy said "an odour of the apocalypse" floated over cities in Pakistan where there was a struggle between moderate and radical Muslims recruited by the intelligence service. He accused Pakistani extremists of transferring nuclear secrets to Iran and helping North Korea to develop the atomic bomb.

Claiming that Pakistan was the real key to all Islamic-led international terrorism, he said that the US had solved only 1% of the problem by deposing Saddam Hussein.