Daily Times

The Sindh High Court on Monday heard appeals of detained suspects in the Daniel Pearl case, a US journalist who was kidnapped and later beheaded in Karachi in 2002 allegedly by Al-Qaeda affiliates.

The court has sought the detention record of suspects from jail officials. The lawyer representing the suspects stated that he believed the life term of his clients had completed and none of the witnesses in the case was an eye witness.

The state prosecution lawyer said that the government of Sindh had approached the court regarding extension in term doled out to suspects in the case.

It is to recall that the anti-terrorism court had given death sentence to key suspect Omer Saeed Sheikh in 2002. The main convict, Sheikh, was sentenced to death on the charges of kidnapping and killing the US journalist, while his three accomplices – Fahad Naseem, Syed Salman Saqib and Sheikh Muhammad Adil – were sentenced life imprisonment with a fine of Rs 600,000 each by the ATC Hyderabad on July 15. The court also directed the convicts to pay Rs2 million to the victim’s widow, Marianne Pearl.

Furthermore, the state had also filed an appeal seeking enhancement of life terms to capital punishment. Sheikh’s accomplices have also approached the court against their convictions.

Pearl, a journalist for The Wall Street Journal with American and Israeli citizenship, was kidnapped in the city of Karachi in January 2002 while he was researching a story on militants. He was later found beheaded. In March 2007, at a closed military hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a member of Al-Qaeda, claimed that he had personally beheaded Pearl.

Published in Daily Times, January 15^th 2019.