US justice failed Daniel Pearl, report says
The men convicted of murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and beheaded in Pakistan in 2002, were not the killers, and U.S. officials stood in the way of the real murderer being brought to justice, an investigation has found.
Meantime, forensic analysis has proven that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the Sept. 11 mastermind, beheaded Pearl, as he confessed numerous times, according to a report released by a team of U.S. journalists and students.
And nine years after Pearl's death, more than a dozen of the militants involved in his murder remain at large, a testament to the lack of will by Pakistani authorities to prosecute the cases, according to the report, “The Truth Left Behind: Inside the Kidnapping and Murder of Daniel Pearl.”
A group of journalists and students working at Georgetown University “spent more than three years investigating the roles of 27 men linked to the 2002 kidnapping and murder” to create the report, which was published online in conjunction with the Center for Public Integrity.
It found that found that British-Pakistani Ahmed Omar Sheikh and three other men who were convicted of killing Pearl were not even present when Pearl was murdered.
A comparison of a photograph of the veins in the hand that beheaded Pearl shown in a video of his death and a photograph of the veins in Mohammed’s hand showed that Mohammed had indeed killed Pearl, the report concluded.
Mohammed — at one time the No. 3 Al Qaeda leader, who is now in detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, awaiting trial for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — has confessed to killing Pearl on more than one occasion to American and Pakistani interrogators. But the fact that he may have done so while being tortured cast doubt on the reliability of his statements.
After his capture and interrogation by Pakistani agents, Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding while in CIA custody, before being transferred to Guantanamo.
In his 2006 memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” Pervez Musharraf, who was then Pakistan’s president, wrote that Mohammad had confessed during his interrogation by Pakistani agents to taking part in Pearl’s murder. In 2007, Mohammed himself confessed to killing Pearl in a secret proceeding at Guantanamo Bay, according to a military tribunal transcript released by the United States government. “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,” Mohammed reportedly said. “For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the internet holding his head.”
The report suggests that the FBI seemed to shy away from making the results of the forensic analysis public at the time in part to conceal cooperation with the CIA’s secret interrogations and in part to avoid muddying Pakistan’s legal case against Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who lured Pearl into the kidnapping plot. Sheikh was convicted in Pakistan in 2002.
Federal officials decided in mid-2006 not to add Pearl's murder to Sheikh Mohammed's charges because it would complicate plans to prosecute him for the Sept. 11 attacks.
The killing of Daniel Pearl was the subject of a film, "A Mighty Heart," starring Angelina Jolie and based on a book by Pearl's wife, Mariane Pearl.
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