Who Killed Daniel Pearl?

[reprehensor]

And why isn't Omar Saeed Sheikh in US custody?

Mystery Wrapped In Enigma

The Omar Sheikh riddle remains unsolved. If he knows some deadly secrets about the involvement of Musharraf himself, all the latter has to do is to have the appeal dismissed by the court and have him executed quickly. What gives?

by B. Raman, January 3rd, 2006 - Outlook India.com

Every year, as we enter a New Year, my mind goes back to Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based American correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, who met with a brutal end to his young life during a visit to Karachi in January 2002 to enquire, inter alia, into the suspected Pakistani links of international jihadi terrorists.

In his keenness to find out the truth, Pearl fell into a treacherous trap laid by a mixed group of Pakistani terrorists belonging to different organisations and orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British resident of Pakistani origin, who had participated in the so-called jihad against the Serbs in Bosnia before shifting to India. He was arrested in India on a charge of involvement in kidnappings for ransom to help the terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). He was one of those released by the Government of India in December 1999 to meet the demands of a group of terrorists belonging to the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) of Pakistan, who had hijacked an Indian aircraft to Kandahar, then under the control of the Taliban. The HUM is one of the founder-members of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People floated in February, 1998.

After his release by the Indian authorities, who in a shocking submission to the terrorists handed him over to the Taliban, he crossed over into Pakistan and started helping the IIF. He opened an office at Lahore to help Al Qaeda in its fund collection and other activities. He revisited Kandahar shortly before 9/11 and met Osama bin Laden. Shortly after the kidnapping of Pearl and before his murder, Omar Sheikh surrendered to a former official of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who was then posted as the Home Secretary of the Government of Punjab at Lahore.

The ISI kept him in its custody for some days without making an announcement of his surrender. It then transferred him to the custody of the Lahore Police, who, in turn, handed him over to the Karachi Police. During his interrogation by the Karachi Police, he was reported to have admitted not only his role in the kidnapping of Pearl, but also in the planning of the explosion outside the J&K Legislative Assembly in October, 2001, and in the attack on the Indian Parliament at New Delhi on December 13,2001. He also reportedly stated that during his visit to Kandahar to meet bin Laden before 9/11, he had come to know of Al Qaeda's plans for the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US. He reportedly claimed that on his return to Pakistan from Kandahar, he had met Lt.Gen. Ehsanul Haq, then Corps Commander at Peshawar, and conveyed this information to him.

more@link

More on Omar:

Excerpt from the Congressional Record, THE 9/11 COMMISSION FINAL REPORT ONE YEAR LATER -- HON. CYNTHIA McKINNEY (Extensions of Remarks - October 27, 2005)

Mr. JOHN NEWMAN: An FBI team working with cell phone numbers provided by Indian intelligence uncovered a new smoking gun. They learned that the chief of the ISI, Mahmood Ahmed, had ordered Saeed Sheikh to send $100,000 of the kidnapping ransom to Mohamed Atta a month before the 9 /11 attacks. This ugly detail emerged when the FBI team ran traces on Saeed Sheikh's cell phone number beginning in July; the ISI chief's number was among the regular people that Saeed Sheikh communicated with. On October 7th, President Musharraf sacked Ahmed for this notorious act. This story was widely covered in the press around the world, not covered here in the United States ..... It's hard to imagine a revelation more damaging than the fact that Pakistan's intelligence service and most powerful Army commanders were behind the 9/11 attacks and the paymaster, a known terrorist who had been able to carry out his mission because the U.S. and U.K. had set aside justice for his crimes ..... that a sovereign government and supposed ally was so directly involved in the 9 /11 atrocity must have stunned and deeply embarrassed the American Administration ..... The story of Saeed Sheikh and the generals are only lightly covered in western media, and only one American newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, carried it on October 10th.

The 9/11 Commission report which carries Mustafa al-Hawsawi as the paymaster and Sheikh Saeed as the al-Qaeda CFO, has dodged the issue, and does not say if the two are the same or not. Thus, technically, even if the Commission staff knew the truth, they have not told a bald lie. The Administration officials speak on terms of anonymity and were told that the Justice Department had pressed the National Security Council to have Saeed Sheikh extradited. One might be justified in asking the question why would the National Security Council have to be pressed to extradite a murderer of U.S. citizens? By late February <2002>, the issue was moot. Pearl was murdered, and Musharraf swore he would personally hang him before turning him over to the Americans, unlike Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, whom he did turn over. Of course, they had not been western penetrators of al-Qaeda ..... We can no longer say we are protecting sources and methods about a story known to the rest of this planet. We are now mocked for our ignorance about this story, and even members of Britain's Parliament poke fun at us. It is long past time to come clean about Saeed Sheikh...

Complete transcript of Newman's testimony.

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?