KARACHI, 15 February — The chief suspect in the kidnapping of US reporter Daniel Pearl told an anti-terrorism court in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi yesterday he thought the US reporter was dead.
The Pakistan government dismissed the statement as untrustworthy while Pearl’s employer, The Wall Street Journal, said it remained confident Pearl was alive.
British-born militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, commonly known as Sheikh Omar, calmly confessed to the abduction of Pearl in Karachi on Jan. 23.
“As far as I understand, he is dead,” the bespectacled and clean-shaven Omar told the court. In response to a question from the judge, Omar said: “Yes, I kidnapped him.” But the chief prosecutor in the case, Raja Qureshi, advocate general for the province of Sindh, expressed caution.
“Whatever he said, I cannot trust this statement because he was not under oath,” Qureshi told reporters outside the courtroom.
Investigators and government officials also warned that Omar had misled them before, saying he had told them shortly after he was arrested Pearl was still alive.
“This gentleman has been making several statements and changing those statements,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan told a news briefing in Islamabad. “We cannot give any credence to any of these statements that he gives.”
“We continue to remain confident that Danny is still alive,” said a WSJ spokeswoman in London, adding the newspaper was closely monitoring developments.
Police say that Omar gave himself up in the eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday. But Omar, speaking confidently in flawless English, told the court he had been in custody for more than a week.
“I gave myself in to save my family and friends,” he said. “I have been with the police since Feb. 5.” Omar was brought to the court in an armored personnel carrier amid tight security, with his face covered with an off-white cloth.
Removing the covering, he told the court: “I don’t want to defend this case.” Judge Arshad Noor remanded him in custody until Feb. 25.
