LAHORE: Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, prime suspect in 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, was shifted to Lahore from Karachi for security reasons on Monday.
Sindh police handed over Sheikh to Punjab police’s counter-terrorism department (CTD).
In January, the Supreme Court ordered his release, while also dismissing an appeal against Sheikh’s acquittal by Pearl’s family.
“The court has come out to say that there is no offence that he has committed in this case,” Mahmood A Sheikh (no relation with the suspect), who represented Omar Sheikh, said at the time.
He added the court had ordered that three others, who had been sentenced to life in prison for their part in the kidnapping and death, also be freed.
Later that month, the government appealed to the apex court to review its decision after the United States has expressed concern over the ruling and Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated a call for accountability in his first phone call with Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi.
Seperately, the Sindh government also filed a review petition against the verdict. The top court is scheduled to resume the hearing on its petition on March 25. A three-judge bench will take up the request.
Pearl, 38, was abducted on January 23, 2002, in Karachi and beheaded the next month, reportedly by Al-Qaeda. Omar Sheikh had been convicted of helping lure Pearl to a meeting in Karachi in which he was kidnapped.
Prior to his kidnapping, the journalist had been investigating the link between reportedly Pakistan-based militants and Richard Reid, the notorious “Shoe Bomber” who attempted to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes.
In July 2002, following the hearings, an anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Hyderabad had sentenced to death Omar Sheikh and life term to other co-accused. However, all four convicts had moved the Sindh High Court (SHC) in 2002 challenging their convictions.
In his autobiography, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir, former president Pervaiz Musharraf had claimed that Sheikh, a British national and a student at the London School of Economics (reports suggest he did not graduate), was hired by MI6 to engage in “jihadi operations”, adding that “at some point, he probably became a rogue or a double agent”.
