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2020-12-31 India-Pakistan
US poised to take custody of alleged killer of Daniel Pearl
[Jpost] The US is ready to put Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh on trial after a Pak court overturned his murder conviction and ordered him released from jail.

The United States "stands ready to take custody" of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the prime suspect in the kidnapping and murder by beheading of US journalist Daniel Pearl in February 2002.

Jeffrey A. Rosen, acting US Attorney General, said in a statement Tuesday that the United States will put Sheikh on trial if an appeal to reinstate his murder conviction in a top Pak provincial court fails.

Continued from Page 1



Sheikh, a Brit of Pak origin, was convicted and sentenced to death for killing Pearl, but his conviction was overturned by a Pak court in April.

Pearl, The Wall Street Journal’s South Asian bureau chief, had been investigating a story about the alleged financing of al-Qaeda via Pakistain-based bad boys. Pearl disappeared in Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
on Jan. 23, 2002, on the way to what he believed would be an interview, and was decapitated by his captors nine days later. Video of Pearl’s murder by beheading was sent to the U.S. consulate.

The National Movement for the Restoration of Pak Sovereignty bully boy group grabbed credit for abducting Pearl, but Pak security officials said the kidnappers were members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
... a 'more violent' offshoot of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistain. LeJ's purpose in life is to murder anyone who's not of utmost religious purity, starting with Shiites but including Brelvis, Ahmadis, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Rosicrucians, and just about anyone else you can think of. They are currently a wholly-owned subsidiary of al-Qaeda ...
(LeJ), a banned al-Qaeda affiliate.

Karachi police arrested the four men in February 2002. In June 2002, a counterterrorism court sentenced Sheikh to death by hanging. The three others were sentenced to life in prison.

An appeals court in Karachi overturned Sheikh’s murder conviction in April, ruling that he was guilty only of kidnapping Pearl. The court commuted Sheikh’s death sentence
...the barbaric practice of sentencing a murderer to be punished for as long as his/her/its victim is dead...
to seven years in prison and acquitted his three accomplices.

Sheikh has already spent 18 years on death row, which the court said would be counted as time served toward his seven-year sentence, paving the way for his release. As of Tuesday , however, he remained in jug.

"We understand that Pak authorities are taking steps to ensure that Omar Sheikh remains in jug while the Supreme Court appeal seeking to reinstate his conviction continues," Rosen said in Tuesday’s statement.

The statement also said that: "The separate judicial rulings reversing his conviction and ordering his release are an affront to terrorism victims everywhere. We remain grateful for the Pak government’s actions to appeal such rulings to ensure that he and his co-defendants are held accountable."

"If, however, those efforts do not succeed, the United States stands ready to take custody of Omar Sheikh to stand trial here. We cannot allow him to evade justice for his role in Daniel Pearl’s abduction and murder," Rosen concluded.

On December 24, a top Pak court ordered the immediate release of Sheikh and his three alleged co-conspirators in Pearl’s murder.

The US State Department swiftly and strongly reacted to the Pakistain court’s ruling.


"We continue to stand with the Pearl family through this extremely difficult process. We have been assured that the accused have not been released at this time," it said in a statement.

Despite the High Court’s ruling, the Sindh government has not yet released Sheikh or his alleged co-conspirators.

"The High Court had clarified that the accused should not be released if there is a Supreme Court restraining order regarding their detention," according to an official government statement.

The Sindh government and Pearl’s parents have filed separate appeals with the Supreme Court against the appellant court’s April acquittal judgment.

Pearl’s parents, Judea and Ruth, said last week in a statement: "We refuse to believe that the Pak government and the Pak people will let such a travesty of justice tarnish the image and legacy of Pakistain. We believe that our son’s murderers should remain in jail because of the Supreme Court appeals, and we are also heartened to hear the government of Pakistain is filing an appeal against the latest release order so that our son’s murderers will remain in jail and justice will prevail. We have full confidence in the Supreme Court of Pakistain to provide justice for our beloved son and reinforce the paramount importance of the freedom of the press."

The Supreme Court will resume its hearings on Jan 5, 2021.
Posted by trailing wife 2020-12-31 01:22|| || Front Page|| [11136 views ]  Top
 File under: al-Qaeda 

#1 I refuse to believe Pearl's parents can be so naive as to have made that statement by themselves. It was probably written for them by a company man.

So 'take custody'. I found that he was put up in Mirpur Khas a couple of times during the trial [some safehouse], it's 60 klicks east of the actual jail, maybe he still is there - your boys must know. Create a window by arranging another appeal hearing in the SHC [not the SC] and they'll have to put him at the safehouse for appearing. The convoy has to travel Highway 120, the Hyderabad-Mirpur Khas road to the Sindh HC. And do it on the raised stretch just before the residential begins. Use an unmarked armed bird, the jail police taking him to the SHC commons should give up without a fight.

Make a nice video of slitting his throat and throw him into the sea. Claim on C-SPAN that the Lashkar-e-Iblis, a new dangerous splinter of the IS-K has done it. For some reason they are opposed to the sovereignty of Pak, and hate Haq Nawaz Jhangvi.
Posted by Dron66046 2020-12-31 09:23||   2020-12-31 09:23|| Front Page Top

#2  Lashkar-e-Iblis

Army of Satan? Goodness! But since everyone knows Americans don’t speak anything except a poor excuse for English, we couldn’t possibly have made it up.

I refuse to believe Pearl's parents can be so naive as to have made that statement by themselves.

I did wonder. As I recall, Daniel Pearl did not fall far from the tree.
Posted by trailing wife 2020-12-31 09:54||   2020-12-31 09:54|| Front Page Top

#3 From Judea Pearl’s Wikipedia page:

Judea Pearl (born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks (see the article on belief propagation). He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models (see article on causality). In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning".

In 2009 he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:

Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil
When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?
Posted by trailing wife 2020-12-31 10:02||   2020-12-31 10:02|| Front Page Top

#4 ^ Poor mother. Sadly, justice or peace is not achieved without greater violence than the predator's. These people who believe in 'man having gone astray due to evil' just don't have a clue about the universe.

The reason for the normalization of evil is simple; an abundance of King Sauls and very few Samuels.
Posted by Dron66046 2020-12-31 10:10||   2020-12-31 10:10|| Front Page Top

#5 #3 Should've insisted his son learn more math & get a real job.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-12-31 10:10||   2020-12-31 10:10|| Front Page Top

#6 ^ True.

My sister [SC lawyer now] once went for a year of 'caring for the war ridden in Africa'. She came back with just malaria and horror stories of being groped and threatened. But she used it to boost through her 'glass ceiling' or whatever. Sometimes they're just stuffing a resume so they can be promoted. It's dumb I know.

If Danny were really a company boy, I'd understand though.
Posted by Dron66046 2020-12-31 10:23||   2020-12-31 10:23|| Front Page Top

#7  Should've insisted his son learn more math & get a real job.

He was the Southeast Asia bureau chief, based in Mumbai, when he ran off to Karachi to interview people about a story on Richard Reid, the Al Qaeda shoe bomber. Not just a run of the mill scribbler.
Posted by trailing wife 2020-12-31 10:38||   2020-12-31 10:38|| Front Page Top

#8 ^Journalist, spit.
Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-12-31 11:17||   2020-12-31 11:17|| Front Page Top

#9 er..fableist
Posted by Procopius2k 2020-12-31 17:14||   2020-12-31 17:14|| Front Page Top

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