A claim by the alleged mastermind of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in the United States that he personally beheaded American reporter Daniel Pearl will be used in an appeal of a British-born man’s conviction in the slaying in Pakistan, a lawyer said. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who has claimed that he planned the Sept 11 attacks, said at a US military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he beheaded Pearl for allegedly being an Israeli intelligence agent, according to a transcript released by the US government last week.Rai Bashir, a lawyer for Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was sentenced to death in 2002 in Pearl’s slaying, said he will use Mohammed’s testimony as evidence that his client did not kill Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter. “What we were saying for so many years in our trial, in the appeal, (is) that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is innocent and he has not committed that murder,” Bashir said in an interview on Saturday with Associated Press Television News. “He has not abducted Daniel Pearl, and he, along with his co-accused, is innocent,” Bashir said in the interview in Lahore. “But now we are happy that this version has been verified by the Pentagon after the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”