Sheikh’s acquittal: A test case for Pakistan-US ties: Shafaqna Exclusive

by Tauqeer Abbas
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In his first statement on Pakistan as the United States secretary of state, Antony Blinken said America was ready to prosecute Omar Saeed Sheikh — the principal accused in the 2002 beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl — in US courts, a day after he was acquitted by the Supreme Court. On Thursday, a three-judge Supreme Court bench acquitted Sheikh by extending the benefit of the doubt to him and ordered his release. The Supreme Court issued the verdict on a petition filed by the Sindh government and Pearl’s parents against a Sindh High Court (SHC) order for Sheikh’s acquittal and immediate release.

Sheikh was accused of kidnapping Pearl in Karachi in Jan 2002 while he was carrying out research on religious extremism in the city. Later a graphic video showing his decapitation was delivered to the US consulate after a month of his abduction. Sheikh was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to death by a trial court. The Supreme Court’s acceptance of the appeal of Ahmad Omar Shaikh and the other convicts of the Daniel Pearl kidnapping-cum-murder may have been inevitable in law, but it also created a bad impression of Pakistan in the USA, and was the first impression the incoming Biden Administration got of Pakistan.

There was some talk of fresh evidence, but though the Sindh government had preferred an appeal against the Sind High Court decision overturning Mr Shaikh’s conviction, it did not produce it. The Supreme Court had to decide according to the evidence before it. The USA now will have to deal with the impression, which will be given as much hype as possible by forces hostile to Pakistan, that the Pakistani state, or at best some of its actors, is doing its best to protect terrorists who committed such acts as Mr Pearl’s brutal beheading.

The US also does not have an extradition treaty with Pakistan, although Islamabad has in the past bypassed legalities to send suspects to the US, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Mohammed has been in US custody on Guantanamo Bay since his arrest in Pakistan in March 2003. He also confessed that he killed Pearl himself, but has not been charged in the Wall Street Journal reporter’s death.The most recent example of Pakistan allowing someone accused of a crime to leave for the US was in 2011, when Raymond Davis, an American contractor at the US embassy in Islamabad, returned home after gunning down two people in Lahore. He had said he opened fire because he felt threatened.

The case could be one of the first major tests for President Joe Biden and US-Pakistan relations have historically been tumultuous. Pakistan likely will play a crucial role in the Biden administration’s attempts to navigate the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pakistan was seen as key to getting the Taliban into negotiations with the Kabul government, even if those talks have been excruciatingly slow and until now have garnered little success, even as violence has spiked. Sheikh’s acquittal has created a conundrum for both countries. Until now, Pakistan has taken every legal step to keep Sheikh in jail but sending him to America could rile up opposition at home and if it does not send him to US, it would create a rift with new US administration.

Shafaqna Pakistan

pakistan.shafaqna.com

 

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