Free Republic

The top al-Qaida operative accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks either killed or took part in the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, Pakistan's president has alleged for the first time. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's claim, made in his memoirs released this week, could now be used to try clear one of Pearl's four convicted killers, who is appealing his death sentence, the prisoner's lawyer said Wednesday. Musharraf accused Khalid Sheikh Mohammed of taking part in Pearl's killing in Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, following the journalist's kidnapping on Jan. 23, 2002. Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and...

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...

April 21, 2002 Pearl murder case Briton ‘was a double agent’Nick Fielding OMAR SHEIKH, the former British public-school boy on trial in Pakistan for the kidnap and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, may have been an agent for both Pakistani intelligence and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organisation. A Sunday Times investigation into Sheikh’s slide from privilege to religious zealotry and terrorism found evidence that he was sheltered and supported for several years by the Pakistani authorities. Documents also show that Sheikh was close to the radical Pakistani cleric Maulana Masood Azhar — a close associate...