Daniel Pearl - Arrests

Arrests

Daniel's father expressed concern in February 2002 that his son's Israeli citizenship would have an adverse effect on the investigation.

Three suspects were caught after the IP address of those who sent the ransom e-mail was traced by the Karachi police. The arrests were carried out after investigation by Pakistani detective Mir Zubair Mahmood, assisted by a FBI computer expert. The mastermind of the kidnapping, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, surrendered to a former ISI officer, Brig. Ijaz Shah, who concealed Sheikh's whereabouts from the Karachi police for a week. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had been in an Indian prison in connection with 1994 Kidnappings of Western tourists in India, and had been freed by the Indian government in exchange for passengers aboard hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 in December 1999.

On March 21, 2002, in Pakistan, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and three other suspects were charged with murder for their part in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. They were convicted on July 15, 2002, and Sheikh was sentenced to death. Sheikh has appealed the sentence, but hearings in his case were postponed over 30 times, and no definitive date had been set.

In his book In the Line of Fire, then-President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf stated that Sheikh was an agent of MI6, who at some point became a double agent.

On March 10, 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged Al Qaeda operative reported to be third in command under Osama Bin Laden, claimed responsibility, before his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, for the murder of Daniel Pearl. He claimed to have beheaded him. In a confession read during his Tribunal hearing, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan." This confession repeated word for word the phrasing leaked in 2002 from his interrogation in a clandestine CIA interrogation center.

On March 19, 2007, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh's lawyers cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession in defense of their client. They said they had always acknowledged that their client played a role in Pearl's murder, but they had always argued that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the actual murderer. They plan for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession to play a central role in their appeal of their client's death sentence.

According to an investigative report published in January 2011 by Georgetown University, the Federal Bureau of Investigation used vein matching to determine that the perpetrator in the video of the killing of Pearl was most likely Mohammed, notably through a "bulging vein" running across his hand. Federal officials had been concerned that the confession obtained though waterboarding would not hold up in court and used this forensic technique to bolster their case.