The U.S. State Department on Friday condemned a Pakistani court’s overturning of the convictions of four suspects in the kidnapping and murder case of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, questions loom widely that why the U.S. did not prosecute the “culprit,” who is in their custody since 2003.
Pakistan’s Sindh High Court on Thursday overturned the murder conviction of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. The court charged him only for kidnapping the journalist and sentenced him to seven years in prison. The Sindh High Court also acquitted three others accused in the case Fahad Naseem, Sheikh Adil, and Salman Saqib who were earlier sentenced to life in prison.
Way back in 2011, researchers at Georgetown University, had launched an investigation into the killing concluded that wrong persons were being tried in Pakistan. They had discovered that four men including Sheikh, convicted by a lower court in 2002, were involved in the kidnapping and not the murder of the journalist. “Those responsible for the murder have not yet faced justice,” they said.
On Oct 16, 2003, U.S.’ then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had called Daniel Pearl’s widow Mariane, disclosing that American investigators have cracked the case. She named al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed captured in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in March 2003 in a combined operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), as the culprit.
“We have now established enough links and credible evidence to think that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was involved in your husband’s murder,” Rice told Mariane. Mohammed is being tried for his alleged role in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.
He had told FBI agents in Guantanamo Bay that he had personally slit Pearl’s throat and severed his head to make certain he would get the death penalty and to exploit the murder for propaganda. Some U.S. and Pakistani officials believe Mohammad was assisted by two of his nephews, Musaad Aruchi and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who is also imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.
Even the guard, Fazal Karim, who was picked up in connection with the bombing of the Sheraton Karachi Hotel, told Pakistani police investigator Fayyaz Khan that he had witnessed the murder by three men. He described them as Arabs or Balochis and had provided a description of Mohammed, a Pakistani Baloch raised in Kuwait.
The Pearl Project launched by Georgetown University had identified 27 men who played part in the events surrounding the case. Pearl had built a network of contacts to interview shoe-bomber Richard Reid, the Briton who tried to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger jet over the Atlantic by igniting explosives packed into his footwear.
