KARACHI: The Sindh High Court has termed the detention of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, Fahad Naseem, Sheikh Adil and Salman Saqib in Deniel Pearl murder, as null and void and directed the authorities to release the acquitted. Court has also directed to put the names of all acquitted on Exit Control List (ECL).
Court, while hearing the Daniel Pearl murder case has said that the detention orders of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and others are null and void.
On April 2, 2020, the court heard their appeals against the sentence after 18 years and acquitted Sheikh, Saqib and Nasim. It commuted Sheikh’s death sentence to seven years and fined him Rs2,000,000. Sheikh has already spent 18 years in prison on death row and his seven-year sentence for kidnapping was counted as time served.
The men were, however, detained under Section 11 EEEE (preventive detention for inquiry) of the Anti-Terrorism Act. According to the law, the government may issue preventive detention of any person accused of terrorism for a period of 90 days and it cannot be challenged in court. The first notification was issued the day the men were acquitted and the second one three months after they completed their detention period.
The court has ordered their immediate release, adding that their names should be put on the no-fly list.
These men have been in rotting in jail for the 18 years without committing any crime, said a judge.
Daniel Pearl, 38, a US national was the South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal when he was abducted in Karachi in January 2002 while researching links between militants in Pakistan and Richard C Reid, who is also known as the ‘shoe bomber’ for trying to detonate a shoe bomb while on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001.
Pearl’s wife Mariane Pearl, a US national who was living in Karachi’s Zamzama, wrote a letter to the Artillery Maidan police on February 2, 2002, and said that her husband disappeared on January 23, 2002. She said she received an email from the abductors saying that he has been abducted “in retaliation for the imprisonment of Pakistani men by the US government in Cuba and other complaints”.
A graphic video showing Pearl’s decapitation was delivered to the US consulate in Karachi nearly a month after he was kidnapped.
After this, a case was filed against the suspects and 23 witnesses were produced in the case by the prosecution. Sheikh was arrested by Pakistani security agencies in February 2002 and an anti-terrorism court convicted him and others on July 15, 2002.
An investigation, led by Pearl’s friend and former Wall Street Journal colleague Asra Nomani and a Georgetown University professor, claimed the reporter was murdered by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, not Sheikh. Mohammed — better known as KSM — was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and is being held at Guantanamo Bay
