Pearl killing: Khalid’s claim to be used in Sheikh’s defence

A claim by the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US that he personally beheaded American reporter Daniel Pearl will be used in an appeal of a British-born man’s conviction in the slaying in Pakistan...

A claim by the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US that he personally beheaded American reporter Daniel Pearl will be used in an appeal of a British-born man’s conviction in the slaying in Pakistan, a lawyer said.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has claimed that he planned the 9/11 attacks, said at a US military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he beheaded Pearl for allegedly being an Israeli intelligence agent, according to a transcript released by the US government last week.

Rai Bashir, a lawyer for Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was sentenced to death in 2002 in Pearl’s slaying, said he will use Mohammed’s testimony as evidence that his client did not kill Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter.

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“What we were saying for so many years in our trial, in the appeal, (is) that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is innocent and he has not committed that murder,” Bashir said.

“He has not abducted Pearl, and he, along with his co-accused, is innocent,” he said. “But now we are happy that this version has been verified by the Pentagon after the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.” He did not say when he would officially file Mohammed’s claim as evidence in the appeal.

According to a Pentagon transcript released on Thursday, Mohammed said: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, Pakistan.”

Pearl was abducted in January 2002 in Karachi, while he was researching a story on Islamic militancy. Months later his body was found with his throat slit in a shallow ditch on the city’s outskirts.