Media References For Omar Sheikh

"The reason why people kill journalists is they don’t want to let them finish their work. We can finish their work and send a really clear message that whatever it is you’re trying to stop will not be stopped."
Asra Nomani, former Wall St Journal reporter and friend of Daniel Pearl
The Pearl Project Picks Up the Story Where the Slain Reporter Left Off
Forward, 12 August 2009

"We [Daniel Pearl and his wife Mariane] first came to Karachi four month's ago: September 12, 2001. We flew in from New Delhi.... We had witnessed the [911] attacks almost as they had happened on CNN ... We were here to ask the big questions: Who was responsible for the attacks? Who financed them? Who protected the terrorists?.... In October, the FBI were looking for a link between Omar Saeed Sheikh and the then director of the ISI, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed. They wanted to know who instructed Omar to wire the $100,000 to Mohammed Atta. I read that Ahmed had been dismissed as head of the ISI by President Musharraf on October 7, 2001. So it appeared Omar may have associated with the head of ISI and Al Qaeda. He surrendered to another former ISI officer who held him in custody for a week until just one day before Musharraf met with President Bush.... Questions bounce back and forth in my brain like a Ping-Pong ball gone wild. The distinctions between good and bad, government organisations and terrorist organisations, are not simply fading: they seem to be faces of the same coin. Did Musharraf know Omar was in custody? Could he not know? The CIA (God only knows what their position is here) didn't know?"
'A Mighty Heart' by Mariane Pearl, widow of Daniel Pearl
Virago Press, 2003

British Citizen Omar Sheikh
Why is he not on trial for his reported role in 911?

"The London School of Economics, known for its far-Left radicalism in the 1960s, has been host to at least three al-Qa'eda-linked terrorists, The Telegraph has been told. The three - including one man called Ahmed Omar Sheikh - have been revealed as having links with the LSE in an intelligence file seen by this newspaper and now being studied by police.... Omar Sheikh... has... been named as one of the key financiers of Mohammed Atta, the pilot of one of the jets that hit the World Trade Centre on September 11."
Al-Qa'eda terror trio linked to London School of 'Extremists'
Daily Telegraph, 27 Jan 2002

"The Times has learnt from Pakistani security sources that while in Pakistan some of the [7/7 Lonond] Tube bombers met leading figures from an outlawed terror group called Jaish-e-Mohammed, which has been actively recruiting Britons from universities and colleges since the early 1990s....In the past Jaish has boasted of many British Muslim volunteers in its ranks. Among them is Ahmed Omar Sheikh, a former LSE student and public schoolboy from Woodford, northeast London, who abandoned his studies in 1993. He is now facing a death sentence in Pakistan for the abduction and murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter."
'Holy warrior' casts light on dark links to Pakistan
London Times, 18 July 2005

"Sheikh Ahmad Omar Saeed, already sentenced to death for the grisly murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, is being interrogated by Pakistani intelligence agencies in connection with the 7/7 London bombings.... The intelligence sources said that Omar is being interrogated in view of his British background. They said that the jehadi killer happens to be a London School of Economics graduate and the right hand man of the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar, who used to enjoy close links with British-based jehadi group Al-Muhajiroun, suspected for the 7/7 bombing."
Daniel Pearl killer grilled for 7/7
Daily News & Analysis (India), 29 June 2006

"President Musharraf of Pakistan says that the CIA has secretly paid his government millions of dollars for handing over hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects to America..... The revelation comes from General Musharraf’s memoir, In the Line of Fire, which begins serialisation in The Times today and will further embarrass the White House at a time when relations between the US and Pakistan are already strained..... Pakistani intelligence chiefs are concerned that General Musharraf may jeopardise their relationship with British intelligence agencies after claiming that a convicted terrorist was once an MI6 informer. The President outlines the role played by a former London public schoolboy, Omar Sheikh, in the kidnap and murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, in February 2002. General Musharraf says that Sheikh, who orchestrated the abduction, was recruited by MI6 while he was studying at the London School of Economics and sent to the Balkans to take part in jihad operations there. He alleges that Sheikh later double-crossed British intelligence. 'At some point he probably became a rogue or double agent,' General Musharraf says."
'America paid us to hand over al-Qaeda suspects'
London Times, 25 September 2006

"Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help defend the Muslim rights in Albania and in Kosovo. That's when Al-Muhajiroun got started .....The CIA was funding the operation to defend the Muslims, British intelligence was doing the hiring and recruiting. Now we have a lot of detail on this because Captain Hook [Abu Hamza], the head of Al-Muhajiroun, [his] sidekick was Bakri Mohammed, another cleric. And back on October 16, 2001, he gave a detailed interview with al-Sharq al-Aswat, an Arabic newspaper in London, describing the relationship between British intelligence and the operations in Kosovo and Al-Muhajiroun. So that's how we get all these guys connected. It started in Kosovo...."
Interview with former US Federal Prosecutor John Loftus
Fox TV, 29 July 2005

"There are reports that US investigators have uncovered evidence of financial transfers linking Osama Bin Laden to the 11 September attacks on America. According to FBI sources, Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad, a suspected Bin Laden financial operative, transferred money to Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers, in the days running up to the attacks. Furthermore Atta and two of the other hijackers transferred some $15,000 back to an account under the same name just two days before the attacks. Mr Ahmad, also known as [Omar] Sheikh Saeed, is one of 27 individuals or groups with a known link to Bin Laden who have had their assets in America frozen... Cash transfers were made to Atta via a money service in Florida on 8 and 9 September from an account in Dubai, under the name of Mustafa Ahmad."
Bin Laden's 'cash link' to hijackers
BBC Online, 1 October 2001

"It was in Pakistan where Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, was murdered in 2002. Pakistan has refused to extradite Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born Muslim convicted of the killing, prompting speculation that it fears what he might say. Sheikh was in ISI custody for a week before the FBI was informed and is reported to have given himself up to his former ISI handler."
Just whose side is Pakistan really on?
Sunday Times, 13 August 2006

"Director General of Pakistan's Inter- Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt Gen Mahmud Ahmed has been replaced after the FBI investigators established credible links between him and Umar Sheikh, one of the three militants released in exchange for passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999. The FBI team, which had sought adequate inputs about various terrorists including Sheikh from the intelligence agencies, was working on the linkages between Sheikh and former ISI chief Gen Mahmud which are believed to have been substantiated, reports PTI website. Informed sources said there were enough indications with the US intelligence agencies that it was at Gen Mahmud's instruction that Sheikh had transferred 100,000 US dollars into the account of Mohammed Atta, one of the lead terrorists in strikes at the World Trade Centre on Sept 11, it adds."
Gen Mahmud's exit due to links with Umar Sheikh
Dawn (Pakistan), 9 October 2001

"The FBI conducted a detailed financial investigation/analysis of the 19 hijackers and their support network, following the September 11th attacks.... A continuing investigation, in coordination with the PENTTBOMB Team, has traced the origin of the funding of 9/11 back to financial accounts in Pakistan...."
'Terrorism Financing: Origination, Organization, and Prevention'
John S. Pistole, Deputy Assistant Director, Counterterrorism Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, 31 July 2003

"Less well known is evidence of the British government's relationship with a wider Islamist terrorist network. During an interview on Fox TV this summer, the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus reported that British intelligence had used the al-Muhajiroun group in London to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo. Since July Scotland Yard has been interested in an alleged member of al-Muhajiroun, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who some sources have suggested could have been behind the London bombings. According to Loftus, Aswat was detained in Pakistan after leaving Britain, but was released after 24 hours. He was subsequently returned to Britain from Zambia, but has been detained solely for extradition to the US, not for questioning about the London bombings. Loftus claimed that Aswat is a British-backed double agent, pursued by the police but protected by MI6. One British Muslim of Pakistani origin radicalised by the civil war in Yugoslavia was LSE-educated Omar Saeed Sheikh. He is now in jail in Pakistan under sentence of death for the killing of the US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 - although many (including Pearl's widow and the US authorities) doubt that he committed the murder. However, reports from Pakistan suggest that Sheikh continues to be active from jail, keeping in touch with friends and followers in Britain. Sheikh was recruited as a student by Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), which operates a network in Britain. It has actively recruited Britons from universities and colleges since the early 1990s, and has boasted of its numerous British Muslim volunteers. Investigations in Pakistan have suggested that on his visits there Shehzad Tanweer, one of the London suicide bombers, contacted members of two outlawed local groups and trained at two camps in Karachi and near Lahore. Indeed the network of groups now being uncovered in Pakistan may point to senior al-Qaida operatives having played a part in selecting members of the bombers' cell. The Observer Research Foundation has argued that there are even 'grounds to suspect that the [London] blasts were orchestrated by Omar Sheikh from his jail in Pakistan'. Why then is Omar Sheikh not being dealt with when he is already under sentence of death? Astonishingly his appeal to a higher court against the sentence was adjourned in July for the 32nd time and has since been adjourned indefinitely. This is all the more remarkable when this is the same Omar Sheikh who, at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lormel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit. Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for questioning by the US about 9/11. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission Report of July 2004 sought to downplay the role of Pakistan with the comment: 'To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance' - a statement of breathtaking disingenuousness. All this highlights the resistance to getting at the truth about the 9/11 attacks and to an effective crackdown on the forces fomenting terrorist bombings in the west, including Britain."
Michael Meacher, former UK environment minister
Britain now faces its own blowback
Guardian, 10 September 2005

"On Thursday, October 16, 2003, a warm and slightly overcast day in Washington, D.C., White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice called Daniel Pearl’s widow, Mariane, with some startling information. It was their first conversation ever, and Mariane was caught off guard. In a cool voice, Rice delivered blockbuster news that would tie the Pearl abduction-murder to the horrors of the 9/11 attacks that preceded it. 'We have now established enough links and credible evidence to think that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was involved in your husband’s murder,' Rice said. KSM, as he was called, was the alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. 'What do you mean ‘involved?’' Mariane Pearl asked. Since the earliest days of discovering that her husband had been murdered, she had suspected Al Qaeda’s involvement. She had never been satisfied with the July 2002 convictions of Omar Sheikh and three co-defendants as closing the case. 'We think he committed the actual murder,' Rice responded. Rice doled out her information selectively. She didn’t tell Mariane Pearl how officials had reached that conclusion or what evidence they had to back it up. She did not offer any proof that KSM was the killer, nor identify his accomplices in the murder. Most significantly, Rice didn’t let on to what was then one of the Bush administration’s most closely-held secrets—that KSM was being held in a secret CIA prison and had been subjected to waterboarding and other hard-core interrogation techniques. Those facts would turn out to have major consequences. They both raised questions about the reliability of KSM’s confession and created a major obstacle to ever trying him in a U.S. criminal court for Pearl’s murder. Rice made a similar call to The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor Paul Steiger, who in turn called John Bussey, the paper’s foreign editor, to discuss running a story. There was no question in their minds that this was an important development in the investigation of the murder of their colleague. And Rice had not specifically requested that the conversation be considered off the record, that is, not usable for publication. The editors decided to run a story in the newspaper’s Monday edition. Bussey passed the assignment to Steve LeVine, who had known Pearl and worked with him in Pakistan. On Friday, the day after Rice called Mariane, Frederick Jones II, deputy press secretary at the National Security Council, called back after learning that The Wall Street Journal was preparing a news story. According to the widow, he expressed outrage. 'We’re angry that the Wall Street Journal is doing a story. We called The Wall Street Journal as Danny’s employer,' Jones told Mariane. Jones later told the Pearl Project that he could not recall details about the phone call, but he said Rice would have made the call to Steiger assuming it would be off the record, not to be published, since the Pearl investigation was ongoing. The Wall Street Journal had spoken to U.S. officials during the investigation to find Pearl with those ground rules. Rice 'would have called Steiger as someone who had been involved in the story and [as] this gentleman’s employer,' Jones said. 'We do a lot of things as humans and as people. Daniel Pearl was another American citizen that people cared about.' In response to the National Security Council’s concerns, the editors agreed to cite Rice anonymously as a 'government official' in the article. That gave Rice some deniability and made it harder for other reporters to advance the story, which might have led them in the direction of the CIA’s secret activities. Renditions, secret prisons, and 'black sites' weren’t yet part of the post-9/11 lexicon. Journalists would only soon start writing about secret detentions. Despite the certainty expressed by Rice, KSM’s culpability was not a sure thing to everyone. His possible role had surfaced in a January 26, 2003, Time magazine story when reporters identified KSM as the man wielding the knife, citing Pakistani police interrogation of a guard, Fazal Karim. Still, could the confession of a top terrorist be believed or was he just eager to boost his own importance by claiming responsibility for a string of high-profile terrorist acts? Further, there was the issue of whether a confession extracted from waterboarding was reliable. Experts say that someone subject to torture will say anything to make it stop. FBI agent Michael Dick, one of the agents sent to Pakistan immediately after Pearl’s abduction, still was looking for some confirmation in early 2004, some four months after the Journal’s story on KSM. He knew that the alleged 9/11 mastermind was in secret custody. He wasn’t privy to the interrogation tactics used against KSM. Dick edited the Pearl murder video to create still photos of frames of the video that showed the hand of the masked killer. His idea was to see if the beefy right hand matched KSM’s. He turned to a CIA officer assigned to the FBI as a liaison officer. Dick asked him: Could he send the still to his CIA colleagues holding KSM? The liaison officer agreed to the request. A response soon arrived: 'The photo you sent me and the hand of our friend inside the cage seem identical to me.' The distinguishable feature: the bulging vein that ran across the murderer’s hand. Vascular technology, or 'vein-matching,' is a forensics technology that has not been widely tested. It’s popular among some forensics experts, but is not as reliable as other biometrics techniques such as fingerprints. However, the CIA and FBI sometimes use this type of technology in order to identify suspects. By extracting the information of the vascular structure of a hand or finger and converting it into a mathematical quantity, this technology creates a template for each structure and then compares the template of a known individual to a suspect. The FBI agent was ecstatic. This was informal confirmation, and now he wanted to go through channels to get official documentation to add to the evidence against KSM. He asked Jay Kanetkar, the FBI case agent on the Pearl case, to send a forensic scientist to KSM to confirm the match. Eager to get the evidence, Dick went to the acting chief in his unit, Ed Dickson. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' Dickson responded, according to people familiar with the conversation. The agent protested. Dickson reiterated his point: 'Don't mess with the case.' The caution reflected two concerns: keeping distance from CIA activities and upsetting the Omar Sheikh convictions by bringing in a suspect who actually wielded the murder weapon. The agent walked away, frustrated....In October 2007, at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, KSM had visitors. One he knew: FBI agent Frank Pellegrino, who had pursued him since the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He had interviewed him earlier in the year about 9/11. With him was an FBI analyst and another agent, John Mulligan, who had jetted to Karachi in the days after Pearl’s kidnapping. 'No one’s happy with the resolution of the Daniel Pearl case,' said an FBI agent. 'If he did it, we want him prosecuted.' Pellegrino explained Mulligan was there to ask about the Pearl murder. First, the men took photos of KSM’s hands in various positions. 'I know what you’re doing,' Mohammed said at one point, repeating what he had supposedly said in CIA custody. What they were doing was very simple: They wanted their own confirmation that KSM’s hand matched that of the man who killed Pearl. Mulligan left the interview convinced KSM was the murderer. Pellegrino wasn’t sure. It had been a year and two months between Pearl’s murder and KSM’s arrest. He could have learned details of the murder from other folks. But he had started the interview not believing it was possible. After the interview, he sat on the fence. Back in the office, Pellegrino looked at the images of KSM’s hand and the killer’s hand. It was enough of a match that he couldn’t rule KSM out. In Pakistan, the news of KSM’s confession was music to the ears of Rai Bashir Ahmad, the grizzled defense attorney that Omar Sheikh had hired to defend him in the 2002 case that sentenced him to death for Pearl’s kidnapping and murder. Bashir said he would file a new appeal that rested on one new fact: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession. It would join a long list of appeals, citing errors including contradictions in the evidence introduced in trial."
Asra Q. Nomani, Barbara Feinman Todd, Kira Zalan, Rebecca Tapscott, Bonnie Rollins, Karina Hurley, and Dmitri Ivashchenko
The Edge of Terrorism - The Truth Left Behind: Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie
The Cutting Edge News, 25 April 2011

"According to around 800 secret files released this week by WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website, Rabbani had been in detention at the Guantanamo Bay camp since Sept 19, 2004, — two years after his arrest in Karachi. He continues to be under detention as US officials consider him to be a high risk detainee. The Wikileaks files contain secret US documents about detainees from various countries at Guantanamo Bay — from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and from Palestine to Kenya. The highest number of detainees are from Afghanistan. The files include reports on interrogation of 69 Pakistani detainees, some of whom were assessed to have no links with Al Qaida or Taliban and were recommended for release. However, it is not clear whether they have been released or not. In some cases, an earlier recommendation about release of a detainee was reversed, indicating that the recommendation had not been implemented. The interrogation report about Rabbani is ostensibly based on the detainee’s own account 'These statements are included [in the report] without consideration of veracity, accuracy or reliability,' the report prepared on June 9, 2008, said. Rabbani, according to the report, admitted that he was an Al Qaeda facilitator from early 2002 to Sept 2002. During this period he managed a number of safe houses in Karachi and had direct to many senior Al Qaeda members, including Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri and others. These safe houses provided logistical support to most of the Sept 11, 2001, hijackers, the investigation report said. He was directly involved with terrorist plans and operations. In late 1998 or 1999, Rabbani’s brother, Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, who is also detained in Guantanamo Bay, allegedly recruited him for extremist activities. He travelled to Afghanistan to receive training in the use of firearms with an intent to fight in Myanmar. Rabbani travelled from Karachi to Khost, Afghanistan, attending a training centre _ the Khaldan training camp. Here he received training in the use of different weapons, including the AK-47 assault rifle, PK machinegun, mortars, and rocket propelled grenades (RPGS), but was expelled after three months for smoking. After staying in Bagram (Afghanistan) for three months, Rabbani returned to Karachi and was instructed by his brother to go to a hospital on Tariq Road in order to help care for wounded Al Qaeda fighters. Almost one year later, Rabbani met Umar Sheikh. The latter asked him if he had been to Al Qaeda training camps. The detainee replied he had, but was removed for a minor violation. Sheikh was initially sceptical, but later asked Rabbani to work for him as a cook in safe houses in Karachi. In addition to cooking and cleaning, the detainee transported goods to Afghanistan for Al Qaeda personnel. The goods included computers, electronic components and some unspecified unknown items. He was also responsible for renting guesthouses frequented by Al Qaeda operatives and members of their families.... The reason for his continued detention, according to US army officials, was that he had admitted to working directly for for Al Qaeda from early 2000 to Sept 2002. He was alleged to have run several safe houses in Karachi. While working for Khalid Sheikh, he had direct access to a number of senior Al Qaeda members and helped facilitate the movement of most of the Sept 2001 hijackers. He had met Osama bin Laden on numerous occasions, including twice at the Kandahar airport. Osama had been living at the Kandahar airport when Rabbani delivered a number of items sent to him by Khalid Sheikh..... Rabbani reported that Osama’s son, Saed Bin Laden, lived in Karachi with his wife and son, from Jan 2002 through at least June 2002. Sheikh provided a safe haven for Saed in Karachi. While Saed was there, he would occasionally come with Sheikh to one of the detainee’s safe houses at house number D-255, Block 13 D, Gulshan-i-Iqbal. During a raid on the detainee’s safe house on Tariq Road, Pakistani authorities discovered over 20 individually wrapped passports, most of which were valid documents belonging to the wives and children of Osama, stored next to remotely-activated electronic detonators. Al Masri was the military chief of Al Qaida and engineered the attacks on US forces in Somalia in 1993. He was wanted by the US government for the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa. Rabbani admitted he managed the Gulshan-i-Iqbal guesthouse. Other guesthouses were on Tariq Road and in Defence Society. His guesthouses were frequented by a clutch of senior Al Qaeda members, such as Osama’s security chief, Hamza al-Ghamdi; Al Qaeda’s military operations supreme commander Muhammad Salah al-Din Abd al-Halim Zaydan aka (Sayf al-Adil); USS Cole bombing mastermind Abd al-Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al-Nashiri aka (Mullah Bilal), senior al-Qaida operative, Walid Muhammad Salih Bin Attash, aka (Khallad Bin Attash), Ammar al-Baluchi, and Sheikh. According to the report, Rabbani helped facilitate the movement in Pakistan of 17 of the 19 individuals who conducted the Sept 11 attacks. He did not admit having knowledge of their mission, but did admit picking up some of them up at airports, arranging a safe house, and transporting some of them to their next destination. He maintained that all the hijackers were members of Al Qaeda and would not allow him to speak to visitors. He reported many of the hijackers stayed at a safe house in the Rabia City complex, Block 13. Mohammad Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Hani Hanjour, however, stayed at the 'Defence View' safe house."
Osama`s son stayed in Karachi: Wikileaks
Dawn (Pakistan), 29 April 2011

"Another difference at the Pearl Project model is that the teachers are just as involved in the get-your-hands-dirty reporting as the students. During the Daniel Pearl investigation, Nomani knocked on the door of Omar Sheikh (the mastermind of Pearl’s kidnapping) and questioned his brother at the London home."
The Pearl Project: Bringing colleges into the investigative ecosystem
Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, April 2011

"A fresh investigation into the January 2002 abduction and subsequent beheading of the American journalist Daniel Pearl has revealed that Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed and his three co-accomplices, who had been handed down capital punishment by a Karachi court in July same year, did not commit the murder and were not even present at the crime scene. Sponsored by the Georgetown University, Washington, the findings of the three-and-a-half-year long investigation have concluded that the four militants convicted in the killing, including the prime accused, Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed, did help kidnap the journalist but did not kill him. The findings of the investigation report, titled 'The Truth Left Behind: Inside the Kidnapping and Murder of Daniel Pearl,' actually endorse the March 2007 confession of al-Qaeda’s former chief operational commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammad to having slaughtered Pearl. Khalid was arrested from Rawalpindi in March 2003 and handed over to the US..... Shortly after Pearl’s disappearance, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin, and three accomplices were caught, charged, and convicted of murder and kidnapping. However, the findings of the fresh probe have raised questions about Pakistan’s flawed criminal justice system, saying the four men were convicted of the Pearl murder primarily because the Pakistani authorities knowingly relied on perjured testimony and ignored other leads. According to the findings, which have been published by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, 'Justice was not served; Leads weren’t followed; suspects weren’t interviewed and alleged co-conspirators weren’t prosecuted. The truth was left behind. Pakistan closed the case. The US let the case go dormant, with one FBI agent told by his boss, 'Let sleeping dogs lie.' The report says 14 of 27 people involved in the abduction and subsequent beheading of Pearl are still at large, five are already dead, four have already been convicted and the remaining four are under detention but have not yet been tried by the Pakistani authorities. The report adds that the four men convicted in the Pearl murder could be released if their appeal is ever heard because of false and contradictory evidence used in the trial. The four convicted men including Sheikh Ahmed Omar Saeed, a London School of Economics’ graduate-turned-Jihadi, and three of his accomplices, Fahad Naseem, Salman Saqib and Sheikh Adeel, were put on trial on April 22, 2002 and were handed down capital punishment almost three months later, in July 2002, after a summary trial by an Anti Terrorism Court. But almost eight-and-a-half years after being sentenced to death, the Pearl killers are lucky enough to have dodged the gallows during all those years, primarily because the Sindh High Court has yet to decide their appeals against the death sentence. Both the defence and the prosecution blame each other for stalling tactics. According to the defence attorney Rai Basheer, the prosecution knows it would lose on appeal and is delaying the process, but prosecutor Raja Qureshi dismissed those claims, saying, 'I challenge the defence to come and attend the case properly and consistently, and they will themselves know whose case is weak'. Yet the fresh findings have strengthened the case of Omar Sheikh and his co-accomplices. For instance, it finds significant discrepancies between the Pakistani police reports as well as in the court testimonies, including that of a taxi driver whose account was considered crucial to the conviction."
‘Daniel Pearl killers’ did not kill him
The News (Pakistan), 21 January 2011

"Federal agents have backed up al Qaeda captive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession in the killing of journalist Daniel Pearl by using photographs of the veins in his hands, according to a new report released Thursday. Mohammed confessed to beheading Pearl after his 2003 arrest in Pakistan. But the U.S. admission that he had been subjected to 'waterboarding' -- a practice historically treated as torture -- while in CIA custody cast doubt on the reliability of his confession, according to a lengthy investigation of the Pearl case by the Center for Public Integrity. According to the report, the FBI and CIA used stills from the video of Pearl's killing to match the patterns of the veins in Mohammed's hand in 2004 and repeated the process in 2007, after Mohammed repeated his confession during a hearing at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 'Beyond KSM's confession, the U.S. government has never revealed any corroborating evidence,' the report states. But it called the vein match the 'best evidence' the United States has linking Mohammed to Pearl's 2002 slaying. The FBI had no comment on the report that it used vein-matching technology to confirm Mohammed's identity, and said in a written statement that it is not using the technology 'at this time.' Mohammed is accused of planning al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. According to military prosecutors, he admitted responsibility for the attacks 'from A to Z' during a hearing before a military court at Guantanamo Bay. He has not been charged in Pearl's death, however. According to the report, U.S. officials decided against bringing charges in the Pearl case to avoid complicating Mohammed's prosecution for the 9/11 attacks."
Photos of hands backed up Pearl slaying confession, report finds
CNN, 20 January 2011

"A new report on the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl reveals that U.S. officials used a forensic technique called vein analysis to corroborate the confession of the self-professed killer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who also is suspected of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. The report details problems in bringing to justice others suspected of involvement in the crime, including the recent release by Pakistan of a man thought to have been one of the main players....The report shows that, despite the widespread attention his case garnered, the precise story of Mr. Pearl's final days and the exact timing of his death remain shrouded in a fog of conflicting confessions and testimony by alleged perpetrators, their compatriots and Pakistani investigators. By most accounts, Mr. Mohammed wasn't part of the original plan to abduct Mr. Pearl. He told U.S. investigators that he was pulled in later by another senior al Qaeda operative. Mr. Mohammed was asked to take over because the kidnappers—midlevel and low-level Pakistani militants—didn't know what to do with Mr. Pearl."
Study Tracks Pearl Murder Probe
Wall St Journal, 20 January 2011

"The four men imprisoned for killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were not present during his beheading but were convicted of murder because Pakistani authorities knowingly relied on perjured testimony and ignored other leads, says a report released Thursday. The results of the Pearl Project, an investigation carried out by a team of American journalists and students and spanning more than three years, raise troubling questions.... The four men convicted in the killing did help kidnap the American journalist, according to the investigation. But it says forensic evidence known as 'vein-matching' bolsters the confession of al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, to having killed Pearl. The report says at least 14 of 27 people involved in abducting and murdered Pearl in 2002 are thought to remain free. And the four who have been convicted could be released if their appeal is ever heard because of false and contradictory evidence used in their trial..... Within months of Pearl's disappearance, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani heritage, and three accomplices were caught, charged, and convicted of murder and kidnapping. Sheikh, called the kidnapping's mastermind, was sentenced to death in July 2002. The three others were given life terms, which in Pakistan usually means 25 years. Since then, the men's appeals have gone nowhere in the courts, despite dozens of hearings. Both the defense and the prosecution blame each other for stalling tactics. And there is constant speculation that Sheikh is being protected, possibly by Pakistani intelligence agencies.... The Pearl Project's findings appear to strengthen the defense's hand. For instance, it finds significant discrepancies between Pakistani police reports and later court testimonies, including that of a taxi driver whose account was considered crucial to the conviction.... The murder case against the four convicts also appears weakened by Mohammed's suspected role. The al-Qaida No. 3 claimed after his capture that he beheaded Pearl. Mohammed is being held at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. military prison, and the confession is believed to have come during interrogation that included waterboarding. But the Pearl Project reports that U.S. investigators also used a technique called 'vein-matching' to compare a photo of Mohammed's hand with a photo of a hand shown on the video of Pearl's killing, and that it's a fit.... Two of Mohammed's nephews may have been present during the killing, according to the report, which cites U.S. and Pakistani officials. One nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, is also at Guantanamo... The report notes that neither Mohammed nor the detained nephew is likely to be charged in Pearl's killing because that could complicate cases against them over the Sept. 11 attacks.... How exactly al-Qaida became involved in the Pearl plot remains a mystery. The report cites Mohammed's interviews with FBI agents, in which he said he was directed to Pearl by another al-Qaida leader, Saif al-Adel. It also says that Pearl's murder was 'the first known operation in which Pakistani militants collaborated with al-Qaida.'... In Pakistan, all parts of the justice system — police, prosecuting agencies, defense lawyers and judges — are riddled with corruption and ineptitude. The conviction rate hovers between 5 and 10 percent, according to a report in December by the International Crisis Group. That report also noted that outsiders, including spy agencies, use intimidation to compromise the justice system. Conspiracy theories have flourished in Pakistan about the relationship Pakistan's main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, had with Sheikh. As Pakistani officials were searching for him in 2002, Sheikh turned himself in to a former ISI official, Ejaz Shah, at the urging of his father and his uncle. Yet it wasn't until a week later, on February 12, that U.S. officials learned that police had him, the report says. U.S. authorities told the Pearl Project that they have no idea what happened with Sheikh during those seven 'lost days.' 'Whether Sheikh sought refuge in Shah's custody because there was a family connection and would, therefore, provide a soft landing into the legal system, or whether it was because Sheikh had a long history with the ISI is still unresolved,' the Pearl Project's report states. The Pearl Project's sponsors include Georgetown University and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a program at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. The lead writer of the report was journalist Asra Q. Nomani, with whom Pearl and his wife were staying in Karachi when he was kidnapped."
Investigative report faults Daniel Pearl murder investigation, says many culprits still free
Associated Press, 19 January 2011

"For two years, journalism students at Georgetown University worked tirelessly to separate fact from fiction in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and to finish the story he was pursuing when Pakistani extremists kidnapped and murdered him. The Pearl Project, an in-depth graduate journalism seminar co-directed by former Pearl colleague and friend Asra Nomani, picked up where the reporter left off in 2002, fleshing out Pearl’s exposé of the alleged Pakistani terrorist links to Richard Reid, the British man convicted in 2003 of trying to blow up an airplane by hiding explosives in his shoes. '[Danny’s] work is a window into the murder,' Nomani said. 'The reason why people kill journalists is they don’t want to let them finish their work. We can finish their work and send a really clear message that whatever it is you’re trying to stop will not be stopped.' In July 2002, London-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was sentenced to death by hanging for Pearl’s savage beheading. But Sheikh’s lawyers plan to use the July 2007 confession of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the grounds for an appeal. In July 2007, Mohammed confessed in a closed military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay to personally beheading Pearl, according to The Washington Post. Nomani doesn’t believe that’s the whole story. Part and parcel of the investigation, Nomani said, is reclaiming the man from the myth, extricating Pearl the reporter from Pearl the symbol. 'I hope we can bring Danny to life a little bit in the way journalists work, not in the heroic sense in the way he’s sometimes portrayed, but just as this really dogged reporter who pursued truth and died trying to bring to light truths about our world,' Nomani said. Nomani runs the Georgetown program with Barbara Feinman Todd, associate dean of Georgetown’s master’s degree program in journalism. The two led a course in investigative reporting, guiding a team of 32 students as they followed leads, chased former FBI investigators and obtained faxed documents from Pakistani law-enforcement officials. And now, members of the Pearl Project team, although they will not yet release their results, are confident they’ve put to bed most of the questions they set out to answer. Erin Delmore, who joined the class as a Georgetown senior, said the students 'literally picked up where the FBI left off” in the Pearl murder investigation. 'This is just so far outside the realm of picking up a textbook and getting ready for an essay,' said Delmore, now a reporter with Washingtonian magazine. 'People are skeptical that a group of college kids can solve a murder that took place on the other side of the world.' The class divided itself into beats — Reid’s story or pursuing Pakistani law-enforcement leads, for example — and used a custom-created Web site to track information obtained about the case. Nomani and Todd are now deciding on the best way to present their findings. Options include a book, a graphic novel and a series of traditional news articles."
The Pearl Project Picks Up the Story Where the Slain Reporter Left Off
Forward, 12 August 2009

"For more than a year, a group of Georgetown University students has been poring over documents, searching for cellphone numbers of suspected terrorists and calling Pakistani police in the middle of the night. Now their class project has come to this: They're suing the CIA and the FBI. The students' assignment was to find out who killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and why. Although the class ended last spring and many of the students graduated, they're still trying to write that last paper. Pearl disappeared while reporting in Pakistan in 2002. A video delivered to the FBI showed him being beheaded. Yesterday, the group, known as the Pearl Project and now attached to the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court asking for the release of records by the CIA, FBI, Defense Department and five other federal agencies. Members of the group are seeking, among other things, FBI files on convicted terrorist Richard Reid. Pearl was reporting a story about Reid and his Pakistani handler when he disappeared. They hope the lawsuit will unearth documents or new sources in time for them to finish their final paper late this spring.... In 2002, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was found guilty of planning Pearl's kidnapping and murder and was sentenced to death. Three others were sentenced to life in prison. When the trial began, Pakistani officials said seven other suspects remained at large. At a 2007 hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he is being held, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said he killed Pearl. 'I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,' he said..... Although Mohammed 'has confessed to the crime, there hasn't been any publicly disclosed corroborating evidence,' Todd wrote in an e-mail. 'One of the goals of the Pearl Project is to establish whether there is any evidence linking . . . Mohammed to the murder. Even if we establish conclusively that he did murder Danny, there were three murderers and we want to establish the identities of the other two.' .... They turned to the Freedom of Information Act, a 1966 law that requires government agencies to disclose requested documents unless they are withheld for reasons that include national security and privacy. But the government can decline to confirm or deny that records exist. Delays are common. The students filed dozens of requests, including one to the FBI for communications and documents related to Mohammed's confession, hoping to find evidence corroborating it. The FBI response, according to the complaint, was that the bureau could not process the request without a signed privacy waiver from Mohammed.... The complaint filed yesterday also names the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Central Command and the State, Justice and Treasury departments. 'We have been able to establish cells beyond the four men that were convicted, been able to establish the identities of suspects that are walking the streets,' Nomani said. 'I really do believe that we can identify the murderers.'"
Reporter's Death Inspires a Seminar and a Lawsuit
Wall St Journal, 18 December 2008

"Rashid's indictment of the Bush administration, and his scathing criticism of General Pervez Musharraf, are persuasive. But in making his case, he sometimes reaches too far. He says, for instance, that the White House sought the extradition of Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the convicted murderer of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. 'Pakistan refused,' Rashid writes, disapprovingly. The United States did in fact make a request for his extradition, but it was largely pro forma, I was told later by a senior American official who had been involved in the negotiations. The Bush administration wanted Sheikh tried in Pakistan, the official said, so that he would not have the legal rights he would enjoy in the United States, and so that he could more easily be sentenced to death if convicted. (He was indeed tried and sentenced to death, though the sentence has not yet been carried out.)."
Raymond Bonner - Book review: 'Descent Into Chaos,' by Ahmed Rashid
New York Times, 5 August 2008

".... all these guys [carrying out the 7/7 investigation] should be going back to an organization called Al-Muhajiroun, which means The Emigrants. It was the recruiting arm of Al-Qaeda in London; they specialized in recruiting kids whose families had emigrated to Britain but who had British passports. And they would use them for terrorist work .... the first group of course were primarily Pakistani. But what they had in common was they were all emigrant groups in Britain, recruited by this Al-Muhajiroun group. They were headed by the, Captain Hook [Abu Hamza], the imam in London the Finsbury Mosque, without the arm. He was the head of that organization. Now his assistant was a guy named Aswat, Haroon Rashid Aswat. Aswat is believed to be the mastermind of all the bombings in London... This is the guy, and what's really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him.... What ties all these cells together was, back in the late 1990s, the leaders all worked for British intelligence in Kosovo. Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help defend the Muslim rights in Albania and in Kosovo. That's when Al-Muhajiroun got started .....The CIA was funding the operation to defend the Muslims, British intelligence was doing the hiring and recruiting. Now we have a lot of detail on this because Captain Hook [Abu Hamza], the head of Al-Muhajiroun, [his] sidekick was Bakri Mohammed, another cleric. And back on October 16, 2001, he gave a detailed interview with al-Sharq al-Aswat, an Arabic newspaper in London, describing the relationship between British intelligence and the operations in Kosovo and Al-Muhajiroun. So that's how we get all these guys connected. It started in Kosovo...."
Interview with former US Federal Prosecutor John Loftus
Fox TV, 29 July 2005

".... the corporate media are still largely sticking to the demonstrably false Official Story of 911... So research into the events tends to be by alternative sources. Dissidents believe that the blocking of FBI agents who could have stopped the 911 plot was deliberate act of complicity by the Bush Junta whose popularity and pre-existing invasion goals [of Afghanistan and Iraq] were given an enormous boost by success of the attacks. Now the Natural Law Party has produced a superb piece of research into the British connection [with] Al Qaida.... ex-MI5 employee David Shayler has demonstrated that MI6 was plotting with elements linked to Al Qaida to assassinate Ghadaffi as late as the mid nineties... These are not the only links between Al Qaida and Bush/Blair..... the NLP has investigated the murder of [American] journalist Daniel Pearl and highlights an astonishing fact: The [British] Pakistani sentenced to death for the murder of Pearl, Omar Sheikh, is the same Al Qaida contact who wired USD 100,000 to Mohammed Atta shortly before 911 on the instructions of the head of Pakistani Intelligence General Mahmoud who quietly resigned soon after. Astonishingly, Mahmoud on the days around the 911 attacks was in a series of secret top level meetings in the White House and with hawkish senators on Capitol Hill .... The NLP suspects that Pearl was murdered because he was investigating the smoking gun USD 100,000 transaction and that Sheikh was framed for the murder to stop him talking... [A British MP] has put down a question on the matter to the Foreign Office, which they have refused to answer... The NLP research is to be found at
www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/WATomarsheikhgate.htm ."
Ian Henshall, chair of INK the Alternative Publishers umbrella group in the UK
and publisher of 911dossier.co.uk
Crisis Newsletter, 27 January 2003

"...while Omar may have been our original target [in our search for Danny], in truth he's just one in a massively complicated chain... ultimately he is a tool. But whose? It's become clear that Omar doesn't know where Danny is. That's never been his role. He was the lure; others are the captors.... who is overseeing it all? Who pulls the strings?..."
'A Mighty Heart' by Mariane Pearl, widow of Daniel
Virago Press, 2003

"Despite the absence of a body in the evidence used to convict Sheikh in the murder of Pearl the BBC states that 'Apparently one of the main reasons for proceeding with the trial in Pakistan was because of the mounting pressure from the United States'...."
What Did Britain Know About 911?
'Fight Smart', 28 Aug 2002

"Sheikh was tried for the murder of Pearl behind closed doors. His father has commented that Sheikh was convicted because of injustice 'and some kind of pressure'. His brother told the BBC 'One of the co-accused complained via his lawyer that the police had been beating him quite brutally for hours, trying to make him sign a confession that pinpointed Omar Sheikh as the mastermind behind the kidnapping and he refused. The police then threatened to bring his mother and sister to the police station and gang rape them, at which point he signed the confession.' A further BBC report elaborates: '...the most controversial decision was to hold the trial behind close doors. Even though the case was about the murder of a reputable foreign journalist, at no time were reporters allowed to cover the proceedings. Pakistan's anti-terrorism law specifically states that the entire process should be complete within seven days, but the Pearl murder case went on for more than three months. Not just that, but during this period, the trial judge and the venue were changed three times....' Initially the prosecution told the court that it would produce more than 50 witnesses, but according to the BBC in the end only 'a handful' of people testified on behalf of the government, one of which was an FBI agent who gave 'an opinion' on how Pearl's captors used the internet to distribute his photographs and other messages. 'Interestingly' says the BBC, the complainant in the case, Pearl's widow, did not appear at the request of the prosecution. This required an 'extraordinary concession' from the judge. Mrs Pearl had left the country to give birth to their child. Nonetheless, because she often worked with Pearl on his stories she might have provided some interesting evidence as to what he had been investigating and who he had been meeting with in the period leading up to his abduction. Legal sources close to the Pakistani government reportedly confirm that at the very least Pearl was investigating the ISI."
What Did Britain Know About 911?
'Fight Smart', 28 Aug 2002

"Foreign Office support for the verdict is 'interesting' given that no body or murder weapon has been found, and that one of the main pieces of evidence relied on for the conviction is a confession by Sheikh which he has since retracted claiming it was extracted under torture. The other principal piece of 'evidence' is testimony from a taxi driver who claims he saw Sheikh meeting with Pearl in Karachi. Sheikh denies it, although if true it would certainly lend considerable weight to speculation that Pearl was on the 911 Mahmoud-Sheikh-ISI-CIA trail. According to Gulf News 25 March 'It is ....rumoured that Pearl was in fact especially interested in any role played by the U.S. in training the ISI or backing it in any way'. The paper quotes a source 'close to the Pakistan foreign office' as stating 'Details of any U.S.-ISI cooperation would of course not be appreciated even in Washington, especially regarding U.S. cooperation in promoting any kind of Islamic militancy'. .... The BBC observes that despite strong anti-US feelings in Pakistan 'none of the more than 2,000 foreign journalists who converged on Pakistan when US air strikes on Afghanistan began, has been kidnapped or harassed'. This suggests Pearl was onto something exceptionally sensitive. Given the widespread culture of deception and lying uncovered within the British Foreign Office during the Scott inquiry into the UK's illegal supply of arms to Saddam Hussein, the omens do not look good."
What Did Britain Know About 911?
'Fight Smart', 28 Aug 2002