KARACHI, 25 February — Pakistani authorities said yesterday they would pursue murder charge against the confessed mastermind of US journalist Daniel Pearl’s abduction, as investigators pledged to keep looking for accomplices in the reporter’s grisly slaying. British-born militant Sheikh Omar, who has said he was behind the Wall Street Journal correspondent’s kidnapping here on Jan. 23, is expected to be ordered into judicial custody when he appears again in anti-terrorism court today.
Meanwhile, police widened their dragnet to the border with Afghanistan yesterday in the hunt for Pearl’s killers.
Residents of suspected kidnapper Amjad Hussain Farooqi’s home village, said Hussain appeared there in January accompanied by a British-born man and an Arabic-speaking man days before Pearl’s Jan. 23 disappearance in Karachi.
Security forces were scouring for Hussain and his accomplices Qasim and Hashmir Qadir.
