Mariane Pearl (born Mariane van Neyenhoff, July 23, 1967, Clichy-la-Garenne, France) is the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnaped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002.
Mariane is of Afro-Cuban and Dutch ancestry, and was raised in Paris, France. She is a freelance journalist who met Daniel Pearl while he was on assignment in Paris; they married in August 1999. They lived in Bombay, India, where he was the Wall Street Journal's South Asia bureau chief, later traveling to Karachi, Pakistan to cover aspects of the war on terrorism.
On January 23, 2002, on his way to an interview with a supposed terrorist leader, Pearl was kidnapped by a militant group calling itself The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. This group claimed Pearl was a spy, and sent the United States a range of demands, including the freeing of all Pakistani terror detainees, and the release of a halted U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government. Photos of Pearl handcuffed with a gun at his head and holding up a newspaper were attached. There was no response to pleas from Pearl's editor or from Mariane, who was pregnant.
Nine days later, Pearl was beheaded. His body was found in a shallow grave in the outskirts of Karachi on May 16, and was brought home to the United States. Ten days later, Mariane gave birth to a son, Adam D. Pearl, in Paris, France.
After her husband's death, Mariane authored the memoir A Mighty Heart. The book is currently being adapted into a film starring Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman.
Mariane also co-founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation (www.danielpearl.org), and filed to receive compensation for her husband's death from the September 11th victims' fund. Her claim was formally rejected on the grounds that Daniel Pearl had not died at one of the three attack sites.
Sources
- Daniel Pearl Foundation
- Pearl, Mariane, and Sarah Crichton, A Mighty Heart, New York: Scribner, 2003. ISBN 0-7432-4442-7