s leader says

? Police charged three men in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, officials said Friday, and Pakistan’s president said he was hopeful the journalist would be freed soon.

The three suspects, one of whom is a member of the police special branch, were arrested last weekend after e-mails claiming responsibility for Pearl’s kidnapping were traced to them, police Inspector Kamal Shah said.

Shah said they will appear in court Monday. Under Pakistani law, the judge can either set a trial date, hold them for further investigation or free them.

Dow Jones, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, issued a statement Friday saying it hadn’t heard from Pearl’s kidnappers in more than a week, but remained “very confident” that he is alive and would be released soon, “so that he can be with his courageous wife, and continue the work that has made us so very proud of him.”

The 38-year-old reporter, the Journal’s South Asian bureau chief, was abducted Jan. 23 en route to a meeting in Karachi with Muslim extremist contacts. He was believed to be investigating links between Pakistani militants and Richard C. Reid, a Briton arrested on a Paris-to-Miami flight in December with explosives in his shoes.

The three men charged were identified as Farhad Naseem, Sheikh Mohammed Adeel, a constable with the police department’s special branch, and Salman Saqib.

Police said two e-mails containing pictures of Pearl that were sent to U.S. and Pakistani news organizations were traced to Naseem’s laptop. A police source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Saqib and Adeel both admitted traveling to Afghanistan, where they met the chief suspect, Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, who remains at large.

Pakistani officials had hoped to rescue Pearl before President Pervez Musharraf’s visit to the United States. Musharraf departed Pakistan late Friday and was to meet President Bush at the White House next week.

“We are extremely hopeful,” Musharraf told reporters Friday at a news conference with visiting Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. “We are getting near. We’ve got some key personalities, and I very much hope that we get to him and we get him freed soon.”

Although the key suspect, Saeed, remains at large, several members of his family have been taken into custody. One cousin told The Associated Press that he was released by police after several hours of interrogation.