Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002) was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped by jihadist militants while he was on his way to what he had expected would be an interview with Pakistani Islamic scholar Mubarak Ali Gilani in Karachi, Pakistan. Pearl had moved to Mumbai, India, upon taking up a regional posting by his newspaper and later entered Pakistan to cover the war on terror, which was launched by the United States in response to the September 11 attacks in 2001. At the time of his abduction, he had been investigating the alleged links between British citizen Richard Reid (a.k.a. the "Shoe Bomber") and al-Qaeda; Reid had reportedly completed his training at a facility owned by Gilani, who had been accused by the United States of being affiliated with the Pakistani terrorist organization Jamaat ul-Fuqra.

A few days after his disappearance, Pearl's captors released a video in which he is recorded condemning American foreign policy and repeatedly telling the camera that he and his family are Jewish and have visited Israel, following which his throat is slit and his head severed from his body. Before killing Pearl, the captors had issued an ultimatum to the United States government, namely including the demands that all Pakistani terrorists be freed from American prisons and that the United States move forward with a halted shipment of F-16s for the Pakistani government.

Gilani refuted allegations of involvement with Jamaat ul-Fuqra and Pearl's killing. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British citizen of Pakistani origin, was arrested by Pakistani authorities and sentenced to death in July 2002 for the execution, but his conviction was overturned by a Pakistani court in 2020. Sheikh had previously been arrested by Indian authorities for his involvement in the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists in India, and is also an affiliate of Jaish-e-Mohammed and al-Qaeda, among other armed jihadist organizations.

Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, on October 10, 1963, to Judea and Ruth Pearl (née Rejwan). His father is an Israeli-American of Polish Jewish descent, and his mother was an Iraqi Jew whose family was saved from the Farhud by Muslim neighbors. His family moved to Encino, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, when his father took a position with the University of California, Los Angeles as professor of computer science and statistics and later director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. In 2011, Judea Pearl received the Turing Award, the 'Nobel Prize for Computer Science'. The history of the family and its connections to Israel are described by Judea Pearl in the Los Angeles Times article, "Roots in the Holy Land".

Pearl attended Portola Junior High School and Birmingham High School. He then attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, where he was a Communication major with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a co-founder of a student newspaper called the Stanford Commentator, as well as a reporter for the campus radio station KZSU. Pearl graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in Communication, after which he spent a summer as a Pulliam Fellow intern at The Indianapolis Star.

Following a trip to the Soviet Union, China and Europe, Pearl started his professional journalism career at the North Adams Transcript and The Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts. From there he moved to the San Francisco Business Times.

In 1990, Pearl moved to the Atlanta bureau of The Wall Street Journal and moved again in 1993 to its Washington, D.C., bureau to cover telecommunications. In 1996, he was assigned to the London bureau and in 1999 to Paris. His articles covered a range of topics, such as the October 1994 story of a Stradivarius violin allegedly found on a highway on-ramp and a June 2000 story about Iranian pop music.

He became more involved in international affairs: his most notable investigations covered the ethnic wars in the Balkans, where he discovered that charges of an alleged genocide committed in Kosovo were unsubstantiated. He also explored the American missile attack on a supposed military facility in Khartoum, which he proved to have been a pharmaceutical factory.