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2020-06-30 India-Pakistan
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Pakistan could soon free convicted kidnapper of US reporter Daniel Pearl
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[IsraelTimes] Supreme Court has refused to suspend a lower court’s ruling exonerating Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh before 90-day detention order expires.
A ruling by Pakistain’s Supreme Court on Monday paves the way for a man convicted of involvement in the gruesome 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl to walk free later this week.
The Supreme Court refused a government request to suspend a lower court’s ruling exonerating Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh of Pearl’s murder before a 90-day detention order expires on Thursday.
Continued from Page 1
The Supreme Court also refused to immediately hear the appeal and instead said the appeal would be heard on September 25.
Saeed Sheikh was ordered to remain in detention in April after the Sindh High Court overturned the murder conviction and death sentence
 ...the barbaric practice of sentencing a murderer to be punished for as long as his/her/its victim is dead...
, generating outrage from Pearl’s family, the US government, and media rights groups.
The 90-day detention was ordered under a public order regulation that allows detainees to be held longer if their release could incite violence and chaos.
The lower court upheld a kidnapping charge that carries a seven-year sentence. Saeed Sheikh has been in prison for 18 years, all spent on death row.
"For 18 years he hasn’t even seen the sun. He has been in solitary confinement on death row," his lawyer Mahmood Sheikh, who is no relation, said in a telephone interview on Monday, following the Supreme Court’s refusal to quickly hear the government’s appeal.
Pearl’s parents have also filed an appeal to Pakistain’s Supreme Court challenging the lower court’s ruling.
The government prosecutor, Faiz Shah, declined to say whether the government would seek an extension of Saeed Sheikh’s detention. Saeed Sheikh’s lawyer said a review board would have to be established to extend his detention.
The Sindh High Court in April also acquitted three others accused in the case: Fahad Naseem, Sheikh Adil, and Salman Saqib, who were earlier sentenced to life in prison. Saeed Sheikh, a former student at the London School of Economics, and the others were convicted in 2002.
Pearl, a Wall Street Journal news hound, was kidnapped in Pakistain in early 2002 while working on a story about Islamic hard boys. A videotape received by US diplomats in February of that year confirmed that the 38-year-old was dead. He had been beheaded.
In court testimony and emails released during the 2002 trial, Saeed Sheikh said he developed a personal relationship with Pearl before he was kidnapped, with both sharing their concerns about their wives, who were pregnant at the time. Marianne Pearl gave birth to their son Adam in May 2002.
The Pearl Project, an investigative journalism team at Georgetown University, carried out a three-year investigation into Pearl’s kidnapping and death. They concluded the news hound was beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad
...Mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. He was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistain in 2002 and interned at Guantanamo...
, who was arrested in Pakistain in 2003 and later described as the architect of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Mohammad is a prisoner at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"The prosecution’s cases are won or lost not on the basis of emotion, they are won or lost on the basis of evidence and in this case the prosecution did a woeful job," said Sheikh, the lawyer. "If Daniel Pearl’s parents have any grievance or complaint it should be against the Pak authorities for the prosecution’s failings."
Saeed Sheikh had been arrested in 1994 by Indian authorities, accused of kidnapping three Britons and an American, who were all freed unharmed, in Indian-ruled Kashmir
...a disputed territory lying between India and Pakistain. After partition, the Paks grabbed half of it and call it Azad (Free) Kashmir . The remainder they refer to as "Indian Occupied Kashmir". They have fought four wars with India over it, the score currently 4-0 in New Delhi's favor. After 72 years of this nonsense, India cut the Gordian knot in 2019, removing the area's special status, breaking off Ladakh as a separate state, and allowing people from other areas to settle (or in the case of the Pandits, to resettle) there....
In 1999, India freed Saeed Sheikh and two other Lions of Islam in exchange for the release of 155 passengers and crew aboard an Indian Airlines plane hijacked to Kandahar, Afghanistan. 
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Posted by trailing wife 2020-06-30 02:42||
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