ISLAMABAD, 20 April 2005 — British-born militant Sheikh Omar said that he met terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden twice in Afghanistan.
Sheikh Omar sentenced to death for the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan said in a rare interview published yesterday that he met Bin Laden twice in Afghanistan.
Sheikh Omar also admitted he was “involved” in kidnapping Pearl in 2002 but said he did not take part in his murder, according to the latest edition of the English-language magazine Newsline. The magazine said it had obtained written answers from Sheikh Omar to questions smuggled into his cell while he was at Adiala Jail in the northern town of Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. He has since been moved to another prison.
“Yes, I met him twice in Afghanistan,” Sheikh Omar said when asked if he had met the Al-Qaeda chief, the first time the 31-year-old has admitted encountering Bin Laden. He did not say when the meetings took place.
But he added that he did not agree with all of Bin Laden’s methods and was now committed to Mulla Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed, fugitive head of Afghanistan’s Taleban regime, as the “overall leader of all Mujahedeen”.
Sheikh Omar expressed no regret for his actions, saying only that he had “some causes of anxiety, such as the fact that my son is growing up without me — he’s three years old now”. Sheikh Omar’s appeal against his conviction for plotting the abduction and murder of Pearl is pending in a court.
The High Court of Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital, is due to take up the appeal on May 13. He was convicted by an anti-terrorism court in July 2002 and sentenced to death.
Sheikh Omar was held briefly at Adiala in connection with the probe into an abortive attempt on the life of President Pervez Musharraf in December 2003, and is now at Hyderabad jail in southern Pakistan.
Sheikh Omar told the magazine Pearl was “an informer, an American spy.”
Meanwhile, investigators have found a definite and irrevocable link between a Muslim charity and one of the four suspects believed to be involved in the murder of Pearl in February 2002.
A “Trust Deed”, retrieved from at least two banks where Al-Akhtar Trust International outlawed by the American Treasury Department in 2003 for having links with Taleban and Al-Qaeda network has it accounts, shows that Saud Memon is one of its eleven trustees, sources said.
The sources said the name of Saud, who owns the place where Pearl’s remains were found, appeared at number nine on the list of the 11-member Board of Trustees.
