The shaky bond between reporters and militants

Almost two weeks after his apparent abduction, the whereabouts and safety of The Wall Street Journal's reporter Daniel Pearl remains a mystery.

But a flurry of recent messages from his supposed captors - the Islamic group National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty - suggest a division within their organization both over their goals and over the fate of their American captive.

US-trained Pakistani antiterrorism experts are now searching areas outside Karachi and are investigating the Islamic group's possible links to desert tribes, according to Reuters reports.

"The kidnappers might have shifted Pearl to some interior parts of the province, which are known for harboring criminals and providing them protection," a source close to the investigation told Reuters. "Investigators are focusing outside Karachi with some police parties being sent to interior parts of southern Sindh province and areas bordering Baluchistan province."

US Embassy spokesman Mark Wentworth says that law-enforcement officials and Mr. Pearl's family continue to be hopeful, and that Pakistani police and FBI telecommunications experts continue to cooperate in tracing the various e-mails and locating Pearl and his captors. "This remains a Pakistani case, and they are pursuing it vigorously," says Mr. Wentworth, from Islamabad.

For journalists who cover South Asia, the search for Pearl has sparked a debate about the dangers of reporting on the radical Islamic movements that may end up shaping the political and religious future of Pakistan and other Muslim nations.

A tenuous symbiosis between reporter and militant has always existed.

Reporters meet with militants, whether in five-star hotels or in isolated village mosques, to find out their views and to get a window into their future actions. Militants agree to meet reporters to share their views with the world.

Yet many journalists who follow militant movements in Pakistan say the abduction of Pearl is an example of how the relationship between militant and reporter has grown more distant and tense in the past few years, and especially after Sept. 11.

"I used to occasionally call a contact in one militant group, but in the last one or two years, they had become pretty reluctant," says Ejaz Haider, news editor for the Friday Times, Pakistan's preeminent English language weekly. "I asked my contact why, and he said, 'Well, what's the point? These journalists talk to us and then they go off and write whatever they want. They never understand our viewpoint.' "

Still, Mr. Haider says, the kidnapping of Pearl is an aberration and that most Pakistani-based militant groups would continue to cooperate with journalists, even Western ones.

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