Pakistan court sends man acquitted of Daniel Pearl murder to ‘safe house’

Pakistan’s supreme court has ordered that the Pakistani-British man acquitted of the 2002 beheading of the American journalist Daniel Pearl be moved off death row and to a government “safe house”.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who has been on death row for 18 years, will be under guard and not allowed to leave the safe house, but his wife and children will be able to visit him.

Sheikh’s father, Ahmad Saeed Sheikh, who attended the hearing on Tuesday, said: “It is not complete freedom. It is a step toward freedom.”

The Pakistan government has been scrambling to keep Sheikh in jail since a supreme court order last Thursday upheld his acquittal over the death of Pearl, a decision that outraged Pearl’s family and the US administration.

In a final effort to overturn the acquittal, Pakistan’s government and the Pearl family have filed an appeal to the supreme court, asking it to review the decision to exonerate Sheikh over Pearl’s murder.

The Pearl family lawyer, Faisal Sheikh, however, has said that such a review has a slim chance of success because the same supreme court judges who ordered Sheikh’s acquittal sit on the review panel.

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The US government has said it will seek Sheikh’s extradition if his acquittal is upheld. Sheikh has been indicted in the US for Pearl’s murder as well as a kidnapping in 1994 of an American citizen in the Indian-ruled sector of the divided region of Kashmir. The American was eventually freed.

In the government-run safe house, Sheikh will be under a 24-hour guard – often by military personnel – and will not be allowed to leave the house. Locations of such safe houses are usually kept secret; Pakistan’s security establishment has several such facilities across the country.

Pearl disappeared on 23 January 2002 in the port city of Karachi where he was investigating links between Pakistani militant groups and Richard Reid, called the “shoe bomber” after his attempt to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes.

The order to send Sheikh to a safe house would seem to be a concession to the federal government, as well as the government of the southern Sindh province in Karachi, which has refused successive orders to release Sheikh, even courting contempt charges from lower courts.