Footage of Pearl murder emerges on Web

Video footage of Wall Street Journalreporter Daniel Pearl being brutally murdered has been appearing on the Internet.

Last Thursday an American website notorious for ghoulish and pornographic content removed a video of Mr Pearl being killed by Islamic extremists in Pakistan.

They say they were forced to do so after the FBI contacted their hosting agent "to inform them that they were going to sue us for putting on the Pearl video...

"We had no other choice than deleting the video... This just shows once again how the 'big people' decide what we can or can't see... We live in a censored world," the website said in a statement.

However, an FBI spokeswoman told Wired Newsit was merely giving advice to websites hosting the video and was not threatening prosecution.

Earlier this month, the American CBS Newsprogramme broadcast a 30-second excerpt of the video. Presenter Dan Rather defended this as necessary to "understand the full impact and danger of the propaganda war being waged."

Mr Pearl's widow denounced CBS’ decision to show the video as "heartless."

Mr Steve Goldstein, a spokesman for Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journalsaid: "We don't believe that there's any good purpose for showing the Daniel Pearl video."

Another US website notorious for its nefarious content posted an edited copy of the execution video. "We never posted any of the gruesome parts of the video, and nobody contacted us or has asked us to remove it," it says in a statement on its site.