‘Mockery of justice’: Pakistan overturns murder conviction in killing of journalist Daniel Pearl

A Pakistani court overturned the conviction of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was found guilty of the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, leading to calls for the ruling to be appealed.

Sheikh had his death penalty sentence voided on Thursday by a two-person judicial panel, which tossed most of the charges against the British-born terrorist and reduced his sentence to seven years. Sheikh has been behind bars for 18 years, and the ruling could mean he will soon walk free. Three other men convicted in the plot — Sheikh Mohammed Adi, Fahad Saleem, and Sayed Salman Saqib — also had convictions overturned.

Pearl, a 38-year-old Jewish American, was in Karachi investigating Pakistani terrorist groups, following leads on al Qaeda and Richard Reid, the British-born “Shoe Bomber” who was accused of trying to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001. After being abducted, Pearl was beheaded on video by al Qaeda operatives on Feb. 1, 2002.

Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl and an Israeli American philosopher and researcher at UCLA, condemned the Karachi high court’s decision on Twitter.

“It is a mockery of justice,” Judea Pearl said. “Anyone with a minimal sense of right and wrong now expects Faiz Shah, prosecutor general of Sindh to do his duty and appeal this reprehensible decision to the Supreme Court of Pakistan.”

Steven Butler, the Asia program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the orgnization was “deeply disappointed to see justice … denied by a Pakistani court today.”

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday the high court ruling tossed the murder charges and reduced Sheikh’s kidnapping-for-ransom charge to just kidnapping. The judges claimed to have found discrepancies in the evidence and said there was not enough proof directly tying Sheikh to Pearl’s killing.

“There are many missing links in the chain of evidence from the abduction of Pearl to his ultimate murder,” said the two-member bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha.

Karachi’s state prosecutor, Faiz Shah, told the Wall Street Journal he would file an appeal to Pakistan’s Supreme Court and seek a stay stopping Sheikh from being let go until the appeal is heard.

Dow, the Wall Street Journal’s publisher, said, “We continue to seek justice for the murder of Daniel Pearl.”

Thomas Joscelyn, the senior editor of the Long War Journal, tweeted that “one can only hope the U.S. is tracking this story (even with everything else going on) and making a determination on the proper response.” He said there is evidence that, besides al Qaeda, at least five other Pakistani terrorist groups were involved with the crimes against Pearl. And he noted that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, “assumed control of the operation after Pearl was kidnapped” and “later boasted that he personally killed Pearl.”

Georgetown University’s “Pearl Project” concluded in 2011 that up to 27 different men played a role in Pearl’s kidnapping and murder, including “a team of kidnappers” led by Sheikh and “a team of killers” led by Mohammed. They didn’t believe Sheikh personally murdered Pearl.

Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and faced harsh interrogations at secretive CIA “black sites” before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006. A judge has yet to rule on whether confessions made to the FBI on the island will be admissible, as defense teams seek to suppress it. Mohammed confessed to planning the 9/11 attacks in a March 2007 statement to the Combatant Status Review Tribunal. He has not been charged for Pearl’s murder, though it is suspected it may happen after the 9/11 case is finished.

James Mitchell, one of the three men who waterboarded Mohammed, contended during testimony at Guantanamo Bay earlier this year that enhanced interrogations were essential in eliciting information.

In one instance, after a female subject matter expert had finished questioning Mohammed, Mitchell recounted, “He said, ‘Go get the lady who gets the notes’ — he’s a chauvinist, because she’s actually an expert — and that’s when he told us about beheading and dismembering Daniel Pearl.”

Mitchell testified that “when KSM mentioned his interactions with Daniel Pearl, we were pressing him about WMD. My impression from that is he did that to distract us from WMD … The shift was to protect that information rather than protecting himself.”

The FBI has said that a vein on the arm of the man in the video decapitating Pearl matches that of Mohammed.

“I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures on the internet holding his head,” Mohammed said.

Mohammed, a close ally of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, is awaiting a 2021 death penalty trial for the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people more than 18 years ago.

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” Mohammed said in a statement over a decade ago. “I was the operational director for Sheikh Osama bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 operation.”

When the judge in a 2008 hearing informed him he could be sentenced to death for his crimes, Mohammed welcomed “martyrdom” and told the judge, “In Allah, I put my trust.” He has since backed away from this.

Mohammed also confessed to helping with Reid’s shoe bombing effort and planning assassination plots against presidents and a pope and is suspected of participating in other terror attacks, including the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia.

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