Whodunnit

Daniel Pearl’s murder mystery persists — nearly two decades on. The main accused in the 2002 murder, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, has got his death sentence overturned by the Sindh High Court. Sheikh has only been found guilty of kidnapping the American journalist and sentenced to seven years in prison as hearing over his appeal against his murder conviction by an anti-terrorism court in July 2002 came to an end last Thursday, after 18 long years. The high court has also acquitted three other accused persons who were earlier sentenced to life in prison in the same case.

The abduction of Pearl, 38, from Karachi and his subsequent decapitation somewhere in Pakistan — captured on camera and released in the form of a video clip — led to massive international outrage at a time when Islamabad was — in the wake of 9/11 — under severe pressure from the US to eliminate terror networks operating on its soil. The names of high-profile figures like alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and al Qaeda member Saif al-Adel also came up during the course of investigation.

That all four who remained under trial for years and years could not be sentenced over the gruesome murder shows that either the prosecution had lost interest in proving the long-running case or it was under some sort of pressure. And if the acquittal of the mentioned accused has really come on merit, it means that the years of investigation had been wasted on the wrong people while real culprits remained untroubled.

As British-born Sheikh has already spent 18 years in prison on death row, his seven-year sentence is supposed to be counted as time served. While Sheikh and the other three are set to walk free, the Sindh Home Department has detained all of them for three months, invoking the law related to the maintenance of public order. Also, the Sindh Prosecution Department has decided to move the Supreme Court seeking suspension of the SHC judgement. The search for the killer thus continues.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 4^th, 2020.

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