Daniel Pearl, the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter, went to Pakistan to investigate terror ties. He was kidnaped and murdered.
In the evening of January 11, 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl walked into a hotel near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and was introduced to a man who called himself Bashir. Pearl thought he was meeting a potential source who could help him get access to a radical Islamic cleric for a story on terrorism. In fact, that night Pearl met a British-born Pakistani militant with a track record of kidnapping Westerners. His real name was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.
Saeed was able to get away with those kidnappings because of an airline hijacking and hostage exchange. Pearl was following a terror trail that led from the UK to Pakistan’s ISI and its Islamists. And the ISI had backed Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Saeed was ISI up to the hilt.
Saeed, the mastermind of the kidnapping, is on death row but is delaying his appeals amid allegations that he is protected by Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). He has also violated Pakistani prison rules for death row inmates by making contact with the outside world from his prison cell. It seems uncertain he will ever be executed, according to the Pearl family, who are frustrated by the slowness of the investigation and want Saeed’s sentence carried out.
Of course he wasn’t. Instead he’s now being freed.
Saeed turned himself in to police on February 12, 2002, but he told a court in Karachi that he had first surrendered to the ISI one week earlier in Lahore. What took place during his time with the ISI is not known, but Saeed’s association with the powerful intelligence agency appears to be protecting him
Saeed was a member of the militant Islamic group Jaish-e-Mohammed whose goal is to unite Indian-administered Kashmir with Pakistan.
JEM, like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, was one of the tools ISI used against its enemies.
From behind bars, Saeed continues to make public statements. He gave an interview to Britain’s Sunday Telegraph in which he pledged allegiance to Taliban leader Mullah Omar and said, “I’m trying to prepare myself to be of real service to the ‘ummah’ (Muslim nation) if I get another chance.”
A Pakistani court’s decision to commute the death sentence of an Islamist terrorist convicted of the 2002 murder of the American-Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl met with fury around the world on Thursday.
Of course none of that matters. Pakistan harbored Osama bin Laden. This is nothing.
Omar Saeed Sheikh, a London-born Muslim, reacted by threatening to kill the judge and calling for a jihad against “Kafirs” (non-Muslims).
After the sentence, Sheikh issued a statement from his prison cell saying: “I will see whether who wants to kill me, will kill me first, or get himself killed … It is a decisive war between Islam and Kafirs, and everyone is individually proving on which side he is.”
The only way there will be justice with Saeed or any Islamic terrorists operating out of Pakistan is with a drone.
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