Court hands police Daniel Pearl suspect
A court in Pakistan today turned over an Islamic militant for police questioning over the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and two failed assassination attempts against President General Pervez Musharraf, police said.
The suspect, Mohammed Sohail, was arrested in Karachi yesterday after a shootout with police.
Sohail was wanted in the killing of Pearl, who was kidnapped on January 23, 2002, in Karachi while researching a story on Islamic militancy. Pearl was later beheaded.
A police official said Sohail is believed to have made the grisly video in which Pearl’s throat is shown being slit with a knife.
In 2003, a court in Karachi sentenced Sohail to death in absentia for a May 8, 2002, bombing near the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi that left 11 French engineers dead. Two other militants, who are in custody, were also given death sentences in the suicide attack.
Today, the judge in Karachi allowed police to interrogate Sohail for five days, said Mohammed Younas, a police investigator.
Judge Mehboob Ali Dhayo ordered that the militant be produced in the court again on March 7, Younas said.
Sohail, a bearded man in his 30s who wore traditional Pakistani attire, was taken to the court with dozens of armed policemen escorting him. He was handcuffed and his head was covered with a hood when he was being taken to a police truck after the court hearing.
Younas said Sohail will be questioned over suspicion that he had surveyed the street in Rawalpindi, a city near the capital Islamabad, where militants targeted Musharraf with two car bomb attacks within 10 days in December 2003.
The president was not harmed in either attack but 17 people were killed in the second bid on his life.
Sohail is believed to have been a close aide of Amjad Hussain Farooqi, one of al-Qaida’s reputed point men in Pakistan.
Farooqi, who was killed in a shootout with police last September in the southern city of Nawabshah, is believed to have masterminded the attacks along with a Libyan al Qaida operative, Abu Faraj al-Libbi.
Al-Libbi is on the run and is wanted by Pakistani authorities.
Sohail, was among six people who fired on police from a motorcycle during a confrontation with authorities yesterday. The shootout began when the men were asked to stop at a routine police checkpoint. The five other suspects fled, but Sohail fell off one of the motorcycles and was captured.
