Verdict on appeals in Daniel Pearl murder case

The Sindh High Court (SHC) is set to announce its verdict on Thursday on the appeals filed by four convicts in the case of the slain American journalist Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002, a media report said.

A two-judge SHC bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha had reserved the judgement last month on the convicts' appeals, pending for the past 18 years, and an appeal of the state seeking enhancement of the sentence after hearing arguments and examining the record and proceedings of the case, Dawn news said in the report.

An anti-terrorism court (ATC) had sentenced to death prime accused Ahmed Omer Saeed Sheikh, commonly known as Shaikh Omar, and life term to co-accused Fahad Naseem, Salman Saqib and Sheikh Adil for the abduction of the slain journalist.

Shaikh Omar and other convicts had moved the SHC in 2002 challenging their convictions handed down by the Hyderabad ATC after finding them guilty of abducting and killing Pearl, the 38-year-old South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal who was researching a story on religious extremists, in January 2002 in Karachi.

Hashim, Asim alias Qasim, Hassan, Ahmed Bhai, Imtiaz Siddiqui and Amjad Farooqui had been declared proclaimed offenders by the trial court, the Dawn news report further said.

The lawyers for the appellants, Rai Bashir and Khawaja Naveed Ahmed, submitted that the prosecution had miserably failed to prove its case against their clients beyond any reasonable doubt and prosecution witnesses were mostly policemen and their testimonies could not be relied upon.

They further contended that the recovery of a laptop computer with e-mails and messages foisted on appellants Naseem and Adil Sheikh, and their confessions before a judicial magistrate were defective and not voluntary.

Deputy Prosecutor Gene­ral Saleem Akhtar supported the trial court's verdict and submitted that the prosecution had proved its case aga­inst the appellants bey­ond a shadow of doubt and reque­sted the court to dismiss the appeals.