KARACHI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A Pakistani court on Thursday travelled the death sentence of the main person accused in the 2002 kidnapping and murder of an American Wall Street Journal press reporter, Daniel Pearl, and acquitted 3 other co-accused in the matter.
All four had actually been founded guilty in connection with Pearl’s kidnapping and murder, including British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was sentenced to death in 2002 for masterminding the murder. He has actually been in jail for 18 years waiting for the result of an appeal.
Pearl, 38, was investigating Islamist militants in Karachi after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States when he was kidnapped in January2002 His case grabbed headlines internationally, after a video of his beheading emerged weeks after Pearl was abducted.
” No evidence has actually been induced record by the prosecution to link any of the appellants to the murder of Pearl and as such all the appellants are acquitted of murder,” stated a two-member bench of the Sindh High Court, in a judgment seen by Reuters.
The United States slammed the judgment, with the leading U.S. diplomat for South Asia writing on Twitter that the decision “is an affront to victims of terrorism all over.”
The court also acquitted all four of charges of kidnapping the American for ransom too, and discovered Sheikh guilty only on the charge of abduction.
Sheikh was sentenced to 7 years on the kidnapping charge, however he is expec