Pak SC begins hearing of Daniel Pearl case

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Supreme Court accepted for preliminary hearing on Monday a set of appeals challenging the Sindh high court decision in the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
Pearl’s parents and the government of the southern Sindh province had filed separate appeals in the SC requesting it to reverse the high court’s decision, which had overturned the convictions of four men in the abduction and murder of the American journalist.
On April 2 this year, the Sindh high court had overturned the death sentence of Omar Saeed Sheikh, a Pakistani-born Briton, and had acquitted three others who had been convicted of the 2002 kidnapping and killing of Daniel Pearl and sentenced to life imprisonment by the trial court. Sheikh’s death sentence was converted into a seven-year jail term.
Sheikh had also spent time in an Indian jail till he was bartered for the 155 hostages on an Indian Airlines plane hijacked in 1999 from Kathmandu to Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Sheikh, who had already spent 18 years on death row, was expected to be released after the high court verdict as his seven-year sentence was to be counted as time already served.
Two days after the high court’s judgment, police had re-arrested the four men on the Sindh government’s orders, saying they would hold them for three months under the maintenance of public order law.
During Monday’s hearing, a three-judge SC bench headed by Justice Mushir Alam barred the authorities from releasing Sheikh and the others, and issued notices to the parties concerned. The hearing of the case was adjourned to Wednesday.
Earlier this month, the apex court had referred the appeals against the overturning of Sheikh’s death sentence to Pakistan Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed with a request to fix the hearing within two weeks as his detention under the maintenance of public order law would end on September 30 (Wednesday).
Pearl, the South Asia bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, went missing in January 2002 from Karachi. A month later, the US consulate in Karachi received video footage of his decapitation. His body was later found at a militant den in the port city.