KARACHI, 13 February — Pakistani police arrested the prime suspect in the kidnapping of American reporter Daniel Pearl yesterday and said British-born militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had told them Pearl was still alive. The arrest of Omar, an activist of Jaish-e-Muhammad, is termed by police a major breakthough in the case.
Karachi police chief Tariq Jamil said Omar had been arrested in the Punjab city of Lahore yesterday and was brought to the southern port of Karachi for further questioning. “During the initial investigation, he said that Pearl is alive and he is in Karachi,” Jamil said.
“He says he (Pearl) is alive and nobody has harmed him,” added a senior official close to the investigation.
Wall Street Journal reporter Pearl, 38, vanished in Karachi on Jan. 23 as he tried to make contact with radical groups and investigate possible links between alleged shoe-bomber Richard Reid and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.
Jamil said the arrest had been made by a team of police from southern Sindh province who had traveled to Lahore, capital of neighboring Punjab province, to hunt for Omar, whom police have accused of masterminding Pearl’s kidnap.
Police did not reveal the circumstances of Omar’s arrest, but said they had been rounding up his associates and raiding their houses in recent days.
“The police were putting pressure on his contacts,” Tasneem Noorani, Pakistan’s interior secretary, told Reuters. “He was picked up at 3 p.m. (1000 GMT).
“It wasn’t a car chase or anything, he was arrested quietly,” Noorani added later. “The chief suspect is with us and we’re hopeful that will lead to the solution of the case.” Omar was jailed in India in 1994 for allegedly kidnapping four tourists there — three Britons and one American.
He was freed, along with two other prominent militants, in 1999 in exchange for 155 hostages on an airliner hijacked to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
For a while he kept a low profile, disappearing from view with his wife and new-born son. But Omar’s name popped up again after the Sept. 11 plane attack on the United States. Omar, the son of a clothes merchant from Wanstead in east London, studied at the London School of Economics. The arrest comes as a boost for President Pervez Musharraf, who began an official visit to Washington yesterday.
