WASHINGTON • A local university has announced plans for an investigative journalism seminar in which faculty and students will search for clues as to what really happened when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi in 2002.

The Pearl Project of Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies will be led by Barbara Feinman Todd, associate dean of journalism, and former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Q Nomani, who is to join Georgetown as a professor in the practice of journalism.

Nomani, Pearl’s friend and colleague from his days at the WSJ’s Washington bureau, rented the Karachi home where Pearl and his wife Mariane were staying at the time of his disappearance.