Exposed – Pakistan’s unending murky games in Daniel Pearl murder case

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<strong>Pakistan Supreme Court's decision to acquit those involved in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has exposed the double game being played by the Islamic nation which "claims to practice democratic norms, yet empowers its security agencies to collaborate with the world’s most dangerous militant groups, from Al Qaeda to the Afghan Taliban to terrorist units carrying out bloody attacks in India."</strong></p>
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In a detailed <a href="https://www.spytalk.co/p/murder-most-fouled-how-pakistani">report</a>, Jeff Stein, the Editor-in-chief of SpyTalk – a US website which reports extensively on intelligence operations, foreign policy, homeland security and military strategy – says that, with the latest development in Pearl murder case, Islamabad’s deeply entrenched intelligence officials have scuttled a chance for Pakistan to improve relations with the United States.<br />
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"Of all the open sores in the long, painful relationship between the United States and Pakistan, the dragged-out case of Daniel Pearl’s murder hurts the worst. From start to finish, the people involved in Pearl’s kidnapping and murder were members of militant groups long backed by Pakistan’s all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI," Stein writes in his report titled 'Murder Most Fouled: How Pakistani Spy Officials Blocked Justice for Daniel Pearl'.<br />
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Pearl, who was The Wall Street Journal's South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped by the terrorists in Karachi in 2002 and murdered by having his throat slit. The gruesome act was videotaped by his captors and circulated on the internet as part of Al Qaeda's plan to spread terror in the aftermath of 9/11.<br />
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British-born terrorist Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, who lured Wall Street Journal scribe Daniel Pearl on the pretext of an interview and handed him over to Al Qaeda associates, was charged in a US court in 2002 with hostage-taking in connection with the murder of Pearl that year and the kidnapping of an American tourist, Bela Nuss, in India in 1994.<br />
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Sheikh was previously arrested by India after the 1994 kidnappings but was among terror suspects freed by India on December 31, 1999 in exchange for the hostages on an Indian Airlines aircraft IC-814 that was hijacked and taken from Nepal to the then Taliban-controlled Afghan city of Kandahar.<br />
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Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered immediate release of Sheikh from his death cell, notifying authorities to move him to a government rest house.</p>
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While the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called up Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi "reinforcing the US concern" about the Pak SC ruling, 36 members of the US Congress also shot a letter to the Pakistani envoy in Washington, Asad Majeed Khan, urging Islamabad to review the acquittal.<br />
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"But the case has also been complicated by the FBI and Justice Department quietly accepting false and conflicting confessions in the U.S. case against Sheikh, who was indicted by a federal grand jury in Newark on March 14, 2002," writes Stein.  <br />
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"One former FBI agent who worked on the case in Pakistan tells SpyTalk that his bosses and then-federal prosecutor Chris Christie “didn’t want to hear” information that undermined a murder charge against the Pakistani suspect. “There was no one else that they could stick with it,” Ty Fairman told SpyTalk in an exclusive interview. “They wanted to get him” because he’d been involved in the kidnapping of two other Americans in India seven years earlier," he added.<br />
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Writing in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/03/daniel-pearl-murder-pakistan-mariane-pearl/?outputType=amp"><em>The Washington Post</em></a> last month, Mariane Pearl, the wife of murdered journalist said she remained "convinced that true justice will never come from above." <br />
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Stein says she is right.<br />
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"The case has been so tainted by corruption and interference by powerful figures in Pakistan’s security establishment that Sheikh is not only likely to go free but escape justice here—in the unlikely event he were shipped to the U.S. for trial. The U.S. and Pakistan have no extradition agreement. The case has been marred from the beginning by false, coerced and contradictory confessions that would make a murder conviction in an American court unlikely," he writes in SpyTalk.<br />
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He quotes former FBI agent Jay Kanetkar, who headed the bureau’s investigation in Pakistan, telling Georgetown University’s Pearl Project that "it would be a nightmare of a case" as Omar Sheikh has undergone a "softening up" by Pakistani police.<br />
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"The main culprit, of course, was KSM (9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), who was captured in Rawalpindi, which also happens to be the headquarters of the Pakistani Army and home to hundreds of current and retired generals and senior officials of the ISI. As the world now knows, Osama Bin Laden lived for some time in Abbottabad, 75 miles north of Islamabad and home to the Pakistani Military Academy. The Al Qaeda leader and his terrorist group had previously been sheltered in Afghanistan by the ISI-backed Afghan Taliban," writes Stein.<br />
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He says that while the ISI had worked hand in glove with the CIA in the 1980s to defeat the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan, elements of it have gone on to work with terrorist organizations to advance Pakistan’s aims of destabilizing India and thwarting its influence in Afghanistan.</p>
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Stein's detailed report also mentions the role played by retired Brigadier Ijaz Shah, a former ISI intelligence officer who gave shelter to Sheikh for a week in February 2002, and who went on to become the Interior Minister in Imran Khan's cabinet. Last December, Shah was made the narcotics minister while Sheikh Rasheed became the new interior minister.</p>
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“I think it's highly doubtful that Pakistan would agree to extradite Omar Sheikh, for the simple reason that he likely has had dealings with the ISI in the past and the Pakistan government would not want that to surface,” Lisa Curtis, a key advocate for a tougher line on Pakistan in the Trump White House National Security Council, tells SpyTalk.<br />
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(Jeff Stein's full article can be read on the SpyTalk website:<a href="https://www.spytalk.co/p/murder-most-fouled-how-pakistani" target="_blank">https://www.spytalk.co/p/murder-most-fouled-how-pakistani</a>)</p>