–Asks top court to reinstate death sentence handed to prime accused Omar Saeed Sheikh
KARACHI: The Sindh government on Wednesday filed an appeal in the Supreme Court against the Sindh High Court (SHC) verdict that overturned sentences of four convicts, including Omar Saeed Sheikh, in American journalist Daniel Pearl murder case.
The government requested the top court to reinstate the death sentence of the prime suspect, Sheikh, whose sentence was reduced to seven years. The provincial government in its three pleas has made all accused respondents involved in Daniel Pearl’s murder case.
It is pertinent to mention here that the Sindh High Court (SHC) in its verdict on April 2 had overturned the sentences of four convicts in the case of the slain American journalist Daniel Pearl.
A two-judge SHC bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha had pronounced three of the four accused ‘not guilty’. In the detailed verdict, the bench declared that the prosecution had failed to prove the case against the suspects. However, it said, the judges found Sheikh guilty of being involved in abduction-for-ransom of the slain journalist and sentenced him seven years in jail.
The US denounced the court acquittal of the four, with the top US diplomat for South Asia writing on Twitter that it was “an affront to victims of terrorism everywhere”.
Subsequently, the Sindh Home Department had issued an order to arrest and detain the four suspects before they were released. “The government of Sindh has sufficient reason that Ahmed Omar Sheikh and Fahad Nasim Ahmed, Syed Salman Saqib, Sheikh Muhammad Adil be arrested and detained for a period of three months from the date of arrest (April 2, 2020),” a top official of the department had said in the order.
Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, was abducted on January 23, 2002, in Karachi and beheaded the next month, reportedly by Al-Qaeda. His murder sent shock waves throughout the world and was covered extensively in the Western media.
In his autobiography In the Line of Fire: A Memoir, former president Pervaiz Musharraf had claimed that Sheikh, a British national and a student at the London School of Economics (reports claim that he did not graduate), was hired by MI6 to engage in “jihadi operations”, adding that “at some point, he probably became a rogue or a double agent”.
THE CASE:
In July 2002, following the hearings, an anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Hyderabad had sentenced to death Sheikh and life term to other co-accused.
However, all four convicts had moved the SHC in 2002 challenging their convictions.
While arguing the case, the defense had maintained that the prosecution had “miserably failed” to prove its case against their clients beyond any reasonable doubt and prosecution witnesses were mostly policemen, whose testimonies could not be relied upon.
They had further contended that Naseem and Adil Sheikh’s confessions before a judicial magistrate were defective and not voluntary.
They had argued that the recovery of the laptop from Naseem was shown to have been made on Feb 11, 2002, while computer expert Ronald Joseph had deposed that he was given the computer for verification on Feb 4 and he examined the laptop for six days.
Deputy Prosecutor General Saleem Akhtar had supported the trial court’s verdict and submitted that the prosecution had proved its case against the appellants beyond a shadow of doubt and had requested the court to dismiss the appeals.
