Karachi, Pakistan ? The kidnapping of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl is widely seen as an attempt to strike a dramatic blow at Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for getting tough on Islamic militants and siding with the United States in the war against terrorism.

Many Pakistanis, including security officials and political analysts, fear the Jan. 23 kidnapping may be followed by other moves by extremists seeking to undermine Musharraf.

Appearing before a judge here Thursday, chief suspect Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh admitted his role in the kidnapping.

“I think that our country shouldn’t be catering to America’s needs,” he added.

Islamic radicals had been suspected of the kidnapping since Pearl disappeared on his way to meet a Muslim activist as part of a story on links between Pakistani militants and Richard C. Reid, arrested in December aboard a Paris-to-Miami flight with explosives in his shoes.

Police said Sunday they detained four people for questioning overnight but at this point do not consider them suspects.

Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistani intelligence officer familiar with Islamic militant organizations, said he believes Pearl, with whom he had spoken several times, became an innocent victim in the struggle between Musharraf and the extremists driven by hatred of the United States.

Pakistan’s Islamic parties maintained close ties with Afghanistan’s former Taliban rulers, whom they admired for promoting “true Islam.”

In an interview with The Associated Press, Khawaja said the Taliban’s defeat and Musharraf’s support for the United States angered religious extremists.

He said that anger was fueled by pictures of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in chains at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In an e-mail to news organizations, which included pictures of Pearl in captivity, the kidnappers said he would be kept in the same “inhuman” conditions as the Guantanamo prisoners.

Musharraf himself drew a link between the kidnapping and his efforts to crush Islamic extremism and support the U.S. war against terror.

“I had expected a certain degree of fallout to these steps,” he told reporters Wednesday in Washington.

Following the Taliban’s downfall, Musharraf moved to confront extremists at home.

In a speech Jan. 12, he banned five Islamic organizations, including two implicated in Pearl’s kidnapping, announced plans to assert state control over religious schools and declared that most Pakistanis do not want to live “in a theocratic state.”

That represented a reversal of the policy of previous governments which promoted ties to religious extremists at home and abroad.