A Pak-British man who was on death row for 18 years before his acquittal in the 2002 beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl was transferred Monday to a government safe house for security reasons, police said.
Ahmad Saeed Omar Sheikh
...also in our archives as Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Ahmed Omar Sheikh. He spent nearly two decades in various Pak government safe houses, protected from being either hanged or transferred to the U.S. for his not-minor role in Israeli-American Daniel Pearl’s heinous murder. He’d been a brilliant but violent lad, growing to be a violent and possibly brilliant man who hit all the jihadi hotspots at their peak: the London School of Economics, Bosnia during their little war, running Al Qaeda’s Afghan training camps, then jailed by India for kidnapping Western tourists in Kashmir for Pakistan’s ISI. He and two Harkat-ul-Mujahideen emirs were traded for the passengers and crew of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999, after which he wandered down to Karachi to hang with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s (KSM) gang. This may yet turn out to have been a fatal error...
was handed over to the Punjab 1.) Little Orphan Annie's bodyguard
2.) A province of Pakistain ruled by one of the Sharif brothers
3.) A province of India. It is majority (60 percent) Sikh and Hindoo (37 percent), which means it has relatively few Moslem riots....
Counter-Terrorism department amid tight security, a police brass hat Suhail Sukhera told The News Agency that Dare Not be Named.
Sheikh was moved to his home city of Lahore from the southern port city of 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...
. Sukhera provided no further details and only said Sheikh was being kept at a well-guarded place.
Sheikh was acquitted by the Sindh High Court in April 2020 and since then Pearl’s family and Pakistain’s government have been fighting a legal battle to overturn the acquittal. Washington has also expressed its concern over the acquittal of Sheikh.
Sheikh has been in jug despite his acquittal under a special law allowing the government to detain people deemed a security risk.
The transfer comes more than a month after Pakistain’s Supreme Court ordered Sheikh moved to a safe house from a special jail cell for inmates sentenced to death.
Authorities say Sheikh will not be allowed to leave the safe house.
So it’s just like bring in a nicer prison. I can live with that.
Pearl disappeared on January 23, 2002, in Karachi where he was investigating links between Pak terrorist groups and Richard C. Reid, dubbed the "shoe bomber." Reid had attempted to blow up a flight from Gay Paree to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes. Sheikh was convicted of helping lure Pearl to a meeting in Karachi, during which he was kidnapped.Pearl’s body was discovered in a shallow grave soon after a video of his beheading was delivered to the US consulate in Karachi. The Pentagon in 2007 released a transcript in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammad
...Mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. He was captured in Faisalabad, Pakistain in 2002 and interned at Guantanamo..., the alleged criminal mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, said he had killed Pearl.