Court orders four men released in Pearl case
Men were accused of kidnapping, killing journalist
A Pakistani court Thursday ordered the release of four men being held over the 2002 abduction and killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl, arguing that they had been acquitted months ago and that their continued detention was illegal.
“These men have been rotting in jail for 18 years without committing any crime,” the presiding judge said, according to local media reports.
Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was abducted and killed in the southern port city of Karachi while working on an investigation about militant groups’ links to alQaida.
In April, the High Court in Sindh province overturned the murder conviction of Ahmed Omar Sheikh, a British national and militant accused of masterminding Pearl’s abduction and killing. They said there was enough evidence against Sheikh to support the abduction charge, but not murder. The court reduced his sentence to seven years, a move that would allow him to walk free since he had already been in jail for 18 years.
The convictions of three other men on murder and kidnapping charges were also overturned in April. But Pakistani authorities had all four men rearrested a day after the court’s acquittals on a measure that allows the government to hold terrorism suspects for up to three months. That measure was repeatedly extended, which the High Court said Thursday was illegal, according to a copy of the order shared with The New York Times.
Pakistan’s government appealed to the Supreme Court to reinstate guilty verdicts, and Pearl’s family filed a petition asking the justices to stay the lower court’s acquittal order. The appeals filed by Pakistan’s government and the Pearl family are set to be heard by the Supreme Court on Jan. 5.
Ruth Pearl, Pearl’s mother, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Faisal Siddiqi, a lawyer for the Pearl family, said Thursday that he did not expect the men would be released from jail, but that if they were, it may not be for long.
“If the appeals are allowed, they go to jail permanently,” Siddiqi said.
The authorities could once again block the court order, but the provincial court in Karachi on Thursday directed security agencies not to place Sheikh or the other accused men under “any preventive detention.”
After the court’s decision, relatives of the men reached Karachi jail, but the jail administration said that they had not received release orders yet, said Munawar Ahmed, a relative of Fahad Naseem, one of Sheikh’s convicted associates.
“With the blessing of God, it is proven again that four men were innocent,” Ahmed said. “It is a victory of justice and truth.”
Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi on Jan. 23, 2002, as he was pursuing a story about Islamic extremism. He was beheaded in early February, in a compound deep in the slums of Karachi.
Soon after Pearl’s killing, Pakistan’s government, then led by President Pervez Musharraf, moved quickly to arrest Sheikh and the other men amid a global outcry and pressure from the United States. The Bush administration requested Sheikh’s extradition.
U.S. officials said that in 2007, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, confessed to personally carrying out Pearl’s murder.
The confession failed to result in the release of Sheikh.