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Omar Saeed Sheikh not dead yet
 Despite being sentenced to death six years ago by an Anti Terrorism Court for the gruesome murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed is lucky enough to have dodged the gallows.The Sindh High Court is yet to decide his appeal against the sentence even though the case hearing has been adjourned for over 100 times since 2002.The 38-year-old American journalist travelled to Pakistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks to work on an investigative story about the alleged intelligence links of some Pakistani militant leaders. He was abducted from Karachi on January 23, 2002, before being beheaded by militants. The killers of Pearl, including Sheikh Omar Saeed, a London School of Economics graduate-turned-Jihadi, and three of his accomplices -- Fahad Naseem, Salman Saqib and Sheikh Adeel -- were put on trial on April 22, 2002. Almost three months later, the Karachi court handed down capital punishment to Omar Saeed Sheikh while his three accomplices were sentenced to life in prison.
However, Omar Sheikh's defence lawyer sees nothing unusual, saying that appeals in murder cases usually last for years. Rai Bashir maintains that the Pearl case had already taken a new twist. He plans to use the confession by the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, that he was the one who had beheaded Pearl. Khaled Sheikh Mohammad had made this confession in the FBI custody, the transcript of which has already been made public by the authorities. Rai Bashir says he would use Khaled's testimony as evidence that his client did not kill Pearl. "What we had been saying for so many years in the appeal is that Omar was innocent and he had not committed that murder. We are happy that this version has been verified by none other than the Americans after the arrest of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed," maintained Rai. He also plans to use Musharraf's published memoirs in defence of Omar Sheikh. "President Pervez Musharraf's book 'In the Line of Fire' will be mustered for an appeal against my client's conviction because it indicated that alleged September 11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and another man had killed Pearl," the lawyer further maintained. However, contrary to his lawyer's contention, the hard fact remains that at his initial court appearance in April 2002, Sheikh Omar had almost confessed to his crime by stating before the court: "I don't want to defend myself. I did this. Rightly or wrongly, I had my reasons. I think our country shouldn't be catering to American needs." Sheikh Omar is a British citizen of Pakistani descent who had first served five years in prison in New Delhi in the 1990s in connection with the 1994 kidnapping of three British travellers. However, he was released from captivity in 1999 along with the defunct Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar, and eventually provided a safe passage to Pakistan by the Taliban regime, after the Indian government was forced to accept the demands of the hijackers of the Indian Airliner IC-814. Two years later, on February 12, 2002, he was arrested in Lahore on the charge of Pearl's kidnapping.
Subsequent Western media reports blamed Sheikh Omar for working for Pakistani agencies under the name of Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad, who had wired $100,000 to the official ringleader of the 9/11 terror attack, Mohammad Atta, from a Saudi Arabian account of the Standard Chartered Bank. On October 6, 2001, a senior US government official told the CNN that American investigators had discovered that Omar, while using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad had sent about $100,000 from the United Arab Emirates to Mohammed Atta. Hardly a month after the money transfer was discovered, the then director general of the ISI, General Mahmood Ahmad, was sacked. It was later reported by the American media that the FBI was further investigating General Mahmood Ahmad's role. Posted by: Fred 2008-11-14 |
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