'Daniel Pearl was killed because he got access to the dark secrets of Musharraf's Pakistan'

His last dateline was his own death. At the end of a journey through the labyrinth of lies and evasions, of deceptions and deviations, all along semaphored by some horrible truth, the reporter became the report.

Daniel Pearl, theWall Street Journal's Mumbai-based correspondent on assignment in Pakistan, disappeared from Karachi on January 23 last year, and resurfaced a few days later-first in photographs, alive but chained, a gun pointed at his temple, and then, in amateur videotapes of his decapitation.

In 21st century's album of evil, these images have a dark intensity; they take us to the dehumanising realm of faith, where innocence and curiosity shatter the idyll of dictatorship, where even a reporter's notebook threatens the book of secrets.

Who killed Daniel Pearl who was desperately trying for an interview with Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, leader of the Jamaat al-Fuqrah and guru of shoe bomber Richard Colvin Reid? Who were those shadowy figures who fixed the appointment that never took place but led him to an abandoned house in the suburbs of Karachi and, eight days later, beheaded him and cut him into ten pieces and buried him in the garden?

The mastermind, Omar Sheikh-the same Omar who was released along with Masood Azhar, the future leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed, from the Indian jail in exchange for the hostages in the Kandahar hijacking drama-may have been arrested and after a show trial, sentenced to death. But have the questions really been answered: Who killed Daniel Pearl? And why?

The man who sets out for answers is not just another journalist. Bernard-Henri Levy is Europe's most flamboyant celebrity philosopher, just BHL in France, worthy of a gushingVanity Fairprofile, and in his passion for ideas and action, a modern-day Malraux, whose battlefield stretches from Bosnia to Afghanistan.