PAKISTAN: He has been described as a charming man and a model student. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had a privileged upbringing in England, before his transformation into the radical Islamic militant who appeared in a Karachi court yesterday over the kidnap of the murdered US reporter, Mr Daniel Pearl.
Arrested on February 12th, he was in custody when authorities in Pakistan received a videotape last Thursday showing Pearl's throat being cut.
Under heavy police guard, Sheikh Omar, who police say has confessed to masterminding Pearl's abduction, arrived at an anti-terrorism court yesterday. He made no plea but told the court that he had been pressured into signing confessions, including blank sheets of paper. The court extended his police detention by 14 days to give investigators more time to recover Mr Pearl's body.
At 28, Sheikh Omar is no stranger to notoriety. After dropping out of the London School of Economics (LSE), Sheikh Omar, as he became known, shot to prominence in 1994 when Indian police arrested him and accused him of involvement in the kidnapping of three Britons and an American tourist in India. He was freed in exchange for passengers of a plane hijacked and flown to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar just two weeks before his case was due to be heard. The Britons - Mr Paul Rideout, Mr Myles Croston and Mr Rhys Partridge - said they had been befriended and then lured to a remote Indian village by a man they knew as Rohit Sharma. He said he was a student at the LSE.
Suddenly, their friend was transformed, tying his victims to a stake and threatening to behead them unless Indian authorities released two Islamic militants fighting for an end to Indian rule in Kashmir.
The tourists were freed after 10 days in a shootout in which a kidnapper and two policemen were killed. Indian police, with the help of the British tourists, later identified Rohit Sharma as Sheikh Omar, who by then had been captured himself after a fight with an Indian policeman on the New Delhi outskirts.
The Wall Street Journal reporter was also lured into a trap. Police allege Omar and his associates spent several days winning Mr Pearl's confidence, pretending they were trying to arrange a meeting with an elusive Islamic radical leader. Finally, investigators say the men called Mr Pearl on his mobile phone and asked for an urgent meeting outside a restaurant on a busy street in Karachi. But instead of taking him to see the elusive radical, they are alleged to have taken him into captivity. In the following week, emails were sent showing Mr Pearl bound in chains and with a gun to his head. He would be killed, his captors said, unless the US released its prisoners from the Afghan war.
The son of a clothes merchant from Wanstead, London, Omar was born in 1974. He attended the prestigious, fee-paying Forest School in north London, where teachers described him as an "all-round and supportive" pupil, who became a house prefect.
Following his 1994 capture, Omar told police he had been disturbed by ethnic strife in the Balkans and went to Croatia in 1993 with a relief organisation called the "The Convoy of Mercy".
There he met Islamic activists and soon after went to Pakistan, linking up with militants and receiving training at a guerrilla camp in Afghanistan. -
(Reuters)
The United States has called on Pakistan to extradite Sheikh Omar, the White House said yesterday. The White House spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, said Washington hopes to bring Omar and those responsible for killing Mr Pearl to justice, but he added that Pakistan is a sovereign nation that continues to follow its own judicial system.
Mr Fleischer said, however, that US officials were working closely with Pakistan in a bid to secure Omar's transfer to the US.- (AFP)