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In the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, a Pakistani court ordered the release of four convicts. This must be done within 24 hours, the lawyer for the four men said. The death sentence against Britain’s Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and the sentences against three co-defendants were already overturned in April. After harsh criticism from the United States, the Pakistani prosecutor appealed to the Supreme Court.
Pearl, the 38-year-old then South Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped in early 2002 while investigating radical Islamists in Pakistan and was later assassinated. Sheikh was arrested that same year and sentenced to death by an anti-terrorism court, while three other co-defendants received life sentences.
In 2011, doubts arose about the sheikh’s guilt. A report from the Pearl Project at Georgetown University in the United States said that the wrong men had been convicted of Pearl’s murder. Consequently, the reporter was killed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and not by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.
