Free Republic

The reporter who comes to Karachi, Pakistan is given certain cautions. Do not take a taxi from the airport; arrange for the hotel to send a car and confirm the driver's identity before getting in. Do not stay in a room that faces the street. Do not interview sources over the phone. Do not discuss subjects such as Islam or the Pakistani nuclear program in the presence of hotel staff. Do not leave notes or tape recordings in your room. Do not discard work papers in the waste basket; flush them down the toilet. Do not use public transportation or...

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen has released the following statement: “We understand that Pakistani authorities are taking steps to ensure that Omar Sheikh remains in custody while the Supreme Court appeal seeking to reinstate his conviction continues. The separate judicial rulings reversing his conviction and ordering his release are an affront to terrorism victims everywhere. We remain grateful for the Pakistani 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....

(excerpt) Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance."...

IN JANUARY 2002 the world’s media received e-mails saying that the journalist Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped. Pearl, a citizen of both the United States and Israel, was the South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. The ransom demands included the release and return to Pakistan of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.The e-mails also stated: “We assure Americans that they shall never be safe on the Muslim Land of Pakistan. And if our demands are not met this scene shall be repeated again and again.” I was incensed when I learnt of this, disgusted that these criminals were distorting...

There in my Canadian newspaper was a photograph of an ordinary house in an ordinary street in ordinary working-class Walthamstow in northeast London. But the bland veneer was shattered by the presence of armed police officers. For this was the home of an alleged terrorist who, it is claimed, wanted to murder thousands of innocent people by blowing up airliners over the Atlantic and give his life in international jihad. No longer ordinary, particularly for me. Because Walthamstow is where I was born, just yards away from where this terror suspect lived. He too was born in Britain, just as...

What a buddy you have, Mr Bush! March 01, 2006 Dear President Bush, As you embark on your courageous visit to Pakistan, the adopted homeland of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Mohammed Omar and other brutal killers of hundreds of your fellow citizens, may I request you to spare a thought for your fellow citizens and for the nationals of other countries who continue to die at the hands of international jihadi terrorists given sanctuary in Pakistan? May I, in particular, request you to spare a thought for a young American man called Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and...

Every year, as we enter a New Year, my mind goes back to Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based American correspondent of Wall Street Journal, who met with a brutal end to his young life during a visit to Karachi in January 2002 to enquire, inter alia, into the suspected Pakistani links of international jihadi terrorists. In his keenness to find out the truth, Pearl fell into a treacherous trap laid by a mixed group of Pakistani terrorists belonging to different organisations and orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British resident of Pakistani origin, who had participated in the so-called jihad against the...

Omar Saeed Sheikh, a hijacker of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 and killer of Daniel Pearl, is officially on the death row in Pakistan. This is the man who epitomises the links between Osama bin Laden, Pakistan's military establishment, the 9/11 hijackers, British jihadis and Kashmiri terrorists. Putting him on the death row, and holding him in an 'isolation' cell helps Musharraf keep a key witness out of American, British and Indian hands. But that 'isolation' seems to be one-sided, as Omar Saeed has been rather effective in turning his prison guards.

As I watched on the TV an announcement by the BBC that the British Police have identified Jamaican-born Lindsey Germaine, who lived in Buckinghamshire, as one of the bombers responsible for the terrorist strikes in London on July 7,2005, I could not help thinking of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist working for the "Wall Street Journal", who was kidnapped and brutally killed by a group of jihadi terrorists belonging to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM---previously known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar HUA ) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) in January-February, 2002. Pearl 's kidnapping and murder was orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British citizen of...

Horrifying new details of how Daniel Pearl, the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter, met his death have emerged from the interrogation of new suspects by Pakistani police. Pearl, who was kidnapped in Karachi in January 2002, knew for several hours that he was about to be killed, but resisted repeated attempts to sedate him, police now believe. He was fully aware of what was happening when the Arab extremists who took control during his final days cut his throat, according to information gleaned from Pakistani militants now in police custody. Shocking video film of Pearl's murder, seen around the world...

In Danny Pearl Book, Lévy Says Next 9/11 Brewing in Pakistanby Ron Rosenbaum "I had the feeling," Bernard-Henri Lévy says, "that the 21st century really began with the collapse of the Twin Towers and the murder of this single man, Daniel Pearl." Both are deeply symbolic killings. What’s more, he contends, the same forces behind both crimes are now planning something far worse."It will make 9/11 look prehistoric," Mr. Lévy says. What he learned in investigating the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Pearl, he contends, brought him face to face with the specter of the next 9/11. From the...

Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl was killed by an Arab after he tried to escape from kidnappers who seized him eight days earlier, Pakistani police said Sunday. Two investigators said the information was gleaned from three men who led police in May to a body that was identified by DNA tests as Pearl. The three — Naeem Bukhari, Fazal Karim and Zubair Chishti — have not been charged in the Pearl case and Pakistani authorities have not even acknowledged publicly that they are in custody.Pearl, 38, was kidnapped Jan. 23 in Karachi. The three men were detained as the...

Retrial may win Omar a new life KARACHI, July 16 (PNS): Notwithstanding the death sentence to Omar Sheikh and life imprisonment to three other co-accused by an anti-terrorism court judge yesterday, senior legal experts and Sindh police officials still believed that an official confirmation about the arrest of three other persons -- directly involved in the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Daniel Pearl -- may prompt the appeal court to remand the case back to the trial court for a fresh trial. Legal experts said that in case of new arrests and fresh evidence, the appeal court would direct...

Pearl Trial Moving to New Site After Threats By Karl Vick and Kamran KhanWashington Post Foreign ServiceFriday, May 3, 2002; Page A20 ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The trial of four men charged with the kidnapping and murder of American newspaper correspondent Daniel Pearl moves to a new city today, after prosecutors complained of death threats from inside and outside the courtroom. Quereshi also complained that two of the defendants had made threatening gestures from behind the bars that separate court officers from prisoners in the makeshift courtroom. "In our Eastern world, when we just put a hand on the chin and...

Cover story: The British jackalFrom a London public school to the shadow of the noose — Nick Fielding unravels a story of terrorism, betrayal and political intrigue that is approaching its denouement in a foreign courtroom Just inside London’s North Circular Road at Snaresbrook, where the outer reaches of the East End give way at last to the genteel villages of Epping Forest, is a fee-paying school of 1,100 pupils that counts among its former students the England cricket captain Nasser Hussain and the Manchester United midfielder Quinton Fortune. The Forest school, founded in 1834, is proud of its...

Gen Mahmud's exit due to links with Umar Sheikh Monitoring Desk NEW DELHI, Oct 8: Director General of Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt Gen Mahmud Ahmed has been replaced after the FBI investigators established credible links between him and Umar Sheikh, one of the three militants released in exchange for passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999. The FBI team, which had sought adequate inputs about various terrorists including Sheikh from the intelligence agencies, was working on the linkages between Sheikh and former ISI chief Gen Mahmud which are believed to have been substantiated, reports PTI website....