Set my husband free, wife urges captors

The wife of kidnapped Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl appealed for his release tonight.

In a televised interview Marianne Pearl said she hoped to start a dialogue with the kidnappers.

She told France-2 television that she wanted ‘‘to explain that it’s a false path to take innocent people to avenge the deaths of others.’’

‘‘I’m trying to start a dialogue with them,’’ said Mrs Pearl, a freelance journalist, who is six months pregnant with their first child.

‘‘He’s being used as a symbol,’’ she said during the brief interview, which was filmed in Karachi, Pakistan.

‘‘It makes no sense.’’

Pearl, 38, the newspaper’s South Asian bureau chief, was abducted in Karachi on January 23 while working on a story about Islamic fundamentalists.

Pakistani police consider Islamic extremists to be the most likely suspects in his kidnapping but are still unsure of Pearl’s whereabouts.

His wife’s first attempt to communicate with the kidnappers came when she published an open letter on Saturday in a Pakistani newspaper, in which she asked the kidnappers to free her husband ‘‘as people inspired by Islam’s ethics.

‘‘I ask them to be people who have the courage to actually take the first step to end this cycle of suffering,’’ she wrote in the letter for the Urdu language newspaper, Jang.

‘‘Let real justice win. Maybe because you have suffered so much, because you are crying so much for justice, maybe you are the first ones to implement justice.’’

Pakistani police, who have mounted an all-out manhunt for Pearl, reported no breakthrough today in their search.

Conflicting claims about the journalist’s fate have complicated the search. Police now believe that several e-mails purportedly from kidnappers were hoaxes.

Two e-mails sent last week, which police believe to be genuine, showed photographs of Pearl.

The photographs variously showed him with a gun to his head, with his hands chained, and holding an edition of a local newspaper.