A Pakistani court on Thursday ordered the immediate release of Omar Saeed Sheikh, one of three terrorists released by India in 1999 in exchange for the passengers of a hijacked plane, declaring his detention in connection with the kidnapping and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl void. empty.
The Sindh High Court said the arrest warrants for Sheikh and three other defendants in the case were null and void. In ordering their release, the court said their names should be put on a no-fly list so that they could not leave Pakistan.
“These men have been rotting in jail for 18 years without committing any crime,” observed the presiding judge.
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In April, the high court had heard the appeals of Sheikh, Fahad Naseem, Sheikh Adil and Salman Saqib 18 years after they were sentenced and acquitted Sheikh, Saqib and Naseem.
It commuted Sheikh’s death sentence to seven years in prison and fined him 2 million rupees. Sheikh has spent 18 years on death row and his seven-year sentence for kidnapping was counted in time already served.
However, the federal government issued a preventive detention order for a period of 90 days under which the four men remained in custody.
The first notice was issued on the day the men were acquitted and the second three months after they completed their initial period of detention. It is not clear what course of action the federal government will take now, but it has opposed the release of Sheikh and the other defendants in the past.
Daniel Pearl, 38, was South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal when he was kidnapped in Karachi in January 2002 while investigating links between militants in Pakistan and Richard C. Reid, known as the “bomber of shoes “for attempting to detonate a bomb while on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001. Pearl was later killed by her captors in Karachi.
Sheikh, a British citizen of Pakistani origin, was freed by India together with the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed, Masood Azhar and the terrorist Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar in exchange for passengers on Indian Airlines flight IC-814, which was hijacked by a group of Pakistani terrorists from Kathmandu to Kandahar in December 1999.
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