The Supreme Court of Pakistan confirmed Thursday, January 28 the annulment of the death sentence of a Pakistani-British extremist suspected of having kidnapped and killed, in 2002, the American journalist Daniel Pearl, paving the way for his immediate release. The Court considered that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had committed “no offense in this case,” Mahmood Sheikh, one of the accused’s lawyers, told Agence France-Presse.
In April, the High Court of Sindh province (south) overturned the death sentence for murder of Omar Sheikh, 47, and commuted his sentence to seven years in prison for kidnapping, a period covered by his eighteen years in detention. This decision was strongly denounced by the US State Department, which saw it as “an affront to victims of terrorism around the world”.
A stormy investigation
Three other men, Salman Saquib, Fahad Nasim and Sheikh Adil, sentenced in July 2002 to life imprisonment for having sent e-mails claiming the journalist’s kidnapping, had been acquitted by the same court. But the province of Sindh, of which Karachi is the capital, then the parents of Daniel Pearl had appealed, which had led to the continued detention of the four accused, despite a new judgment of the same court in December ordering their release.
Daniel Pearl, 38, correspondent for the American daily The Wall Street Journal, had disappeared on January 23, 2002 in Karachi. A video showing his beheading was submitted a month later to the United States consulate in this megalopolis in southern Pakistan. An independent investigation carried out for three years within the framework of the “Pearl Project” had determined in 2011 that the Pakistani justice had erred, the four men condemned for the assassination of the journalist not even being present during his execution.
According to Asra Nomani, a former colleague and friend of Daniel Pearl, who led this investigation, it is the Pakistani Khaled Cheikh Mohammed (KSM according to his initials in English), the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. United, who had executed him.
KSM, arrested in Pakistan in 2003, is being held in the US prison in Guantánamo, Cuba. A psychologist who had questioned him claimed that the detainee had confessed to him that he had beheaded the American journalist.
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