Briton jailed for Daniel Pearl's murder is 'likely to be freed'

The Guardian ^ | 1/20/11 | Declan Walsh

[Nachum]

US investigators say concocted evidence was used to convict Omar Saeed Sheikh for killing of Wall Street Journal reporter

A new investigation into the death of the American journalist Daniel Pearl says that the British jihadist jailed for his murder is likely to be released because Pakistani officials used tainted evidence.

The report, by a collective of American investigative journalists, asserts that Pakistani prosecutors knowingly used perjured evidence to suggest that Omar Saeed Sheikh and three other men were in the room where the Wall Street Journal reporter was killed in 2002.

American officials have found evidence based on "vein analysis" that the killing was carried out by the self-confessed 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who is in Guantánamo Bay. Muhammad confessed to the murder in 2007, but lawyers said his testimony was tainted by torture and he has not been charged.

[La Lydia]

But the report author Asra Nomani said there was little doubt that Sheikh, now 37 and facing a death sentence, was behind Pearl's initial kidnapping. "He was the mastermind behind it and should be held responsible for that," she said.

I smell a rat. A murdering, beheading rat.

[ReverendJames]

For compassion reasons and a gazillion barrels of oil.

[edcoil]

Hey, the brits cannot keep him in jail - hell they let go the lockerby bomber.

[La Lydia]

The Brits don’t have him. He is in Pakistan.

[TribalPrincess2U]

US investigators ?

[jennychase]

This terrorist was involved in terrorist killing in India, he is son of well connected Brit and Paki Army. President Mushraff refused to give him to US or even interview. There are rumors that he never stayed in Jail but lived large in Pakistan.

[jennychase]

He was arrested and served time in prison for the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists in India, an act which he acknowledges, he was released from captivity in 1999 and provided safe passage into Afghanistan with the support of Taliban in exchange for passengers aboard hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814.

[jennychase]

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, in his book In the Line of Fire, stated that Sheikh was originally recruited by British intelligence agency, MI6, while studying at the London School of Economics. He alleges Omar Sheikh was sent to the Balkans by MI6 to engage in jihadi operations. Musharraf later went on to state, “At some point, he probably became a rogue or double agent”

He served five years in prison in Ghaziabad(India) in the 1990s in connection with the 1994 abduction of three British travellers, Myles Croston, 28, Paul Rideout, 26 and Rhys Partridge, 27, and one American, Béla Nuss, 43