HBO probes Daniel Pearl murder

http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...1_%5BFeed%5D-1

By Irv Letofsky
Sun Oct 8, 2006 4:22pm ET

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - There isn't much pleasant entertainment coming out of that war on terrorism. And in these 90 minutes on HBO, you also can count on it to be disturbing -- "The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl" is a carefully assembled documentary of another horror of our time.

From the media coverage, we know plenty about Pearl, the persistent Wall Street Journal reporter who set up an important interview that never was with a supposed financier for al Qaeda in Karachi. It was a setup, and Pearl instead was kidnapped and hacked into 10 pieces. The Jihadi of the title didn't get away with it, not so far. Omar Sheikh is awaiting hanging; his three accomplices each received 25 years in prison.

There's not much personal connection between the two men except violent death. Both came from comfortable circumstances and were well educated -- Pearl at Stanford, Sheikh at the London School of Economics. We get a strong sense of Pearl from his Cuban-Dutch-Baptist wife, Mariane (who had their son 4-1/2 months after his killing), his folks, his editors and colleagues and Pakistani officials, some of them quite excellent sources.

But director-producers Ahmed A. Jamal and Ramesh Sharma shortchange us on Sheikh and his radicalization. This is pretty much a solid study, but these bloodthirsty radicals seldom make for easy sources, thank you.