Abdul Rauf Azhar, one of the terrorists involved in the 2002 kidnapping and beheading of Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl, has been killed in an assault on the Pakistani part of Punjab, according to India.
The strike was ordered as part of Operation Sindhoor, launched in response to a terror attack in the Kashmiri town of Pahalgam, which saw 26 civilians, mostly Hindu tourists, killed on April 22. The Indian government has blamed the attack on Pakistan-based terror groups.
In a social media post following the latest phase of the operation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the governing party of India – announced that Azhar had been among those killed in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur, a suspected stronghold of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).
JeM, led by Azhar’s brother Masood, is an ally of Al Qaeda and has conducted several major terror attacks against India connected with the dispute over the governance of Kashmir, including an attack on the Indian parliament building in 2001. It has been banned in Pakistan since 2002, but Indian officials have long accused the Pakistani government of allowing the group to operate.
The BJP statement read: “#OperationSindoor Most wanted Pakistani terrorist Abdul Rauf Azhar killed.”
Azhar was, according to US officials, among the organisers of a collection of several Al Qaeda affiliated groups that abducted Pearl, the local bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, while he was travelling to Karachi for an interview with Mubarak Al Gilani, a religious leader who had been accused of running a terrorist training camp attended by British failed terrorist Richard Reid.
Claiming that Pearl was a spy, the militants sent a ransom email to the US government, demanding the release of all Pakistani nationals detained in the War on Terror and all Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay, the end of any US military presence in Pakistan and the fulfilment of a delayed shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the nation’s government.
Just over a week later, the group released a video of Pearl, clearly under duress, condemning American foreign policy and repeatedly referencing his Jewish heritage.
At the end of the clip, Pearl’s throat was slit before the terrorists proceeded to decapitate him. His body was later found, cut into ten pieces, in a shallow grave around 30 miles from Karachi.
At the time, WSJ publisher Peter Kann and managing editor Paul Steiger said: “Danny was an outstanding colleague, a great reporter, and a dear friend of many at the Journal.
"His murder is an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of everything Danny's kidnappers claimed to believe in. They claimed to be Pakistani nationalists, but their actions must surely bring shame to all true Pakistani patriots."
The video prompted outrage in the global Jewish community and was one of the earliest example of the public beheadings that later became a feature of jihadi extremist groups. Within three years of Pearl’s death, a further 10 people had been beheaded by Islamist terrorists and videos of their murders released. Most of these were US or European citizens killed by Jordanian terror group Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, which was later absorbed in Al Qaeda and was the early precursor to Islamic State.
