Pakistan court orders immediate release of Daniel Pearl murder accused Omar Sheikh, others

Months after it acquitted the convicts in the Daniel Pearl murder case, the Sindh High Court declared the detention orders of the terrorists ‘null and void’.

Passport of WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by his captors in 2002, on display at the now-closed Newseum in Washington DC | Flickr

New Delhi: The Sindh High Court in Pakistan has ordered an immediate release of terrorist Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and his three aides in connection with the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. 

The court called the detention of these four as “null and void”, according to local media reports. The move came months after Sheikh’s sentence was reduced and his aides were acquitted in the case that made global headlines.

Sheikh, a British-born Pakistani, was one of the three terrorists the Indian government had freed in 1999 in exchange for a hijacked Air India flight and its passengers. He had been arrested in Delhi in 1994 for kidnapping four foreign tourists.

Sheikh and the others were convicted in July 2002, of abduction and murder of Pearl earlier that year. The journalist was in Karachi working on an investigating story on the alleged links between ISI and al-Qaeda. 

Immediate release

In April this year, the Sindh High Court had commuted Omar Saeed Sheikh’s death sentence to seven years in jail and fined him Rs 20 lakh. It retained the abduction charge against him that amounted to seven years’ imprisonment, but since he had already served 18 years, he was effectively released.

The court also acquitted his three aides, Fahad Naseem, Shaikh Adil and Salman Saqib, who were serving a life term.

However, the Pakistani government placed these men under preventive detention for a period of three months under the Anti-Terrorism Act. The orders were renewed for another three months. In October, their detention was extended again.

In the latest verdict, the Sindh High Court has ordered immediate release of the terrorists. It has also ordered their names be put on the no-fly list.

According to a media report, one of the high court judges remarked that these men have been rotting in jail for 18 years without committing any crime.

Pearl was the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal in January 2002 when he was abducted in Karachi while investigating links between militants in Pakistan and ‘shoe bomber’ Richard C. Reid, who had tried to detonate a shoe bomb while on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001.