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U.S.
Journalist Pearl Alive, Arrested Suspect Tells Police
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Pakistani
Police arrest suspected kidnappers |
KARACHI,
Feb. 12 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Pakistani police said they expect to
find kidnapped U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl alive. The chief suspect, British-born
extremist Sheikh Omar, was arrested in a major breakthrough Tuesday, news
agencies reported.
Police
said Omar told them Pearl was alive immediately following his arrest in the
eastern city of Lahore, ending a massive manhunt assisted by the U.S. Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI), AFP reported.
The
arrest is the biggest breakthrough in the three-week-old investigation since the
38-year-old Wall Street Journal correspondent disappeared in this southern city
while researching a story on Islamic activism in Pakistan.
"It
is a major breakthrough in the case. He is being interrogated in Lahore and he
has told the interrogators that Pearl is alive and in Karachi," Karachi
police chief Tariq Jamil told AFP.
A
police spokesman in Lahore said Omar, 29, was being handed over to police in
Karachi, the Sindh provincial capital. "Punjab police from Lahore have
apprehended Sheikh Omar, who is wanted by Sindh police as the main suspect.
Sheikh
Omar has been handed over to Sindh police," the spokesman said.
Omar
became the focus of investigations after three other suspects identified him as
the source of e-mailed photographs of Pearl in captivity. The photographs
showing Pearl with a gun at his head were sent to various media outlets almost
two weeks ago.
The
e-mails included a threat that Pearl would be executed on February 1 unless the
United States released a Taliban diplomat and Pakistanis held prisoner at a U.S.
naval base in Cuba. Washington rejected the demands.
The
London-born Omar is believed to be a senior figure in the outlawed
Jaish-e-Mohammad group, which has been listed as a "terrorist
organization" in the United States. He vanished with his wife and baby
from his home in Lahore just before the kidnapping.
The
three men who confessed to sending the e-mails showing pictures of Pearl
appeared in a Karachi anti-terrorism court earlier Tuesday and were remanded for
14 days.
Fahad
Naseem, Shaikh Adil and Salman Saquib arrived shackled and hooded in an armored
personnel carrier flanked by paramilitary forces with assault rifles and
bulletproof vests, as police guarded against possible retaliatory strikes by the
kidnappers.
Local
media reports have said the three, who have told police they were acting on
Omar's orders, had links to the Taliban in Afghanistan and were committed to the
struggle against Indian rule in Kashmir.
But
it is still not known whether the kidnappers were acting alone or as part of an
underground organization. An unknown group calling itself the National Movement
for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty signed the e-mails.
As
the hunt dragged into its third week with no communication from the kidnappers
for 11 days, Pakistani officials had begun to back away from earlier statements
that they believed Pearl was still alive.
They
are anxious to solve the case before Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf meets
U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington on Wednesday, where Bush is expected
to applaud Musharraf's recent crackdowns.
Omar
spent six years in an Indian prison for allegedly kidnapping foreign tourists in
1993, but was released in late 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked
Indian Airlines jet in Afghanistan.
According
to a portrait sketched by police investigators, he comes from a respected
business family in Lahore, the Punjab provincial capital. He was born in
East London in 1973 where his father ran a shop, but moved to Lahore for
secondary education at the prestigious Aitchison College, returning to Britain
to study at Oxford and then the London School of Economics.
His
father, who has been talking to police during the investigation, said his son's
Islamic fervor sprouted when he took up arms alongside Muslims in Bosnia to
fight the Serbs in 1991. "That was a turning point in his life,"
the father was quoted as saying by one of the police investigators. "From
then on he devoted himself to Islamic struggle."
After
two months in Bosnia, he returned to Pakistan and spent the next two years
shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan as an activist of the Harkat-ul
Ansar, a group that fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from
1979 to 1989, a Karachi-based Islamic cleric told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The
group also sent combatants to fight Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan state
of Kashmir, where Omar also battled Indian troops until the 1993 kidnapping
arrest.
Harkat-ul
Ansar was banned as a terrorist group in 1998, but re-emerged as the Harkat-ul
Mujahedin. Omar and Azhar quit the group after their release from prison, the
Karachi cleric told AFP.
Azhar
went on to found Jaish-e-Mohammad, which was outlawed in Pakistan last month. He
has been in custody in Pakistan since December for inciting opposition to the
government's support of the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan.
Police
say Omar returned to Lahore to live with his family, marrying in November 2000.
But his father told investigators that Omar put his university-educated wife
"under the veil in accordance with orthodox Islamic tradition,"
according to AFP, and he rarely left Lahore without her, showing his "deep
attachment to his family."
"Omar
would often rebuke his elders about their lust for money and tell us that a man
should live for more noble causes," a police officer quoted one of his
uncles as saying.
Other
close relatives recounted numerous occasions in which Omar would suddenly
disappear, without revealing his whereabouts or activities. The Karachi
cleric said for the past year Omar had acted in an individual or
"freelance" capacity, unaligned to any particular group.
"He
was not an activist of one jihadi group, but was in contact and working with
more than one, like a freelancer," the cleric said, adding that he may have
set up his own group.
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