One of the men suspected of beheading American journalist Daniel Pearl more than a decade ago has been released from a Pakistani jail. Qari Hashim Ali, who had been detained since August 2005, walked free from the Hyderabad central jail on Friday after an anti-terrorist court said there was not enough evidence to hold him.
'It is a great victory for truth and my client,' defense counsel, Sher Muhammad Leghari said, the Indian Express reported. 'We had filed an acquittal plea... arguing that there was no evidence.'
Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal, vanished in Karachi in January 2002. A month later authorities received video footage of him being beheaded. His decapitated body was found in a shallow grave in May 2002.
Hashim had been apprehended for arranging a meeting between Pearl and another of the men accused in the killing.
The mastermind behind the killing, British-born Pakistani Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was sentenced to death in 2002 and remains in the Hyderabad Central jail in Sindh province. His co-accused, Salman Saqib, Fahad Naseem and Sheikh Adil, were given life sentences.
Another suspect, Saud Memon, who was accused of providing the place where Pearl was held before his death, died in mysterious circumstances in May 2007.
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Court official Abdul Samih told the BBC that Justice Abdul Ghafoor Memon had ordered for Hashim to be released immediately.
Earlier this year, Sheikh tried to hang himself in prison, AFP reported.
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