Acquitted killer of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl transferred from death row to Pakistani safe house

The Supreme Court of Pakistan on Tuesday ordered that the man acquitted last year of kidnapping and murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 be transferred off death row and into a government "safe house." 

Ahmad Saeed Omar Sheikh, who has been on death row for close to two decades, will remain under guard and will not be allowed to leave the safe house, but his family will be allowed to visit him. 

The government of Pakistan has been trying hard to prevent Sheikh's release since he was acquitted last year. That acquittal by the country's Supreme Court was met with outrage from the Pearl family and the U.S. government.

The family and the government of Pakistan filed one final appeal to the Supreme Court, requesting that it review the decision to exonerate Sheikh of Pearl's gruesome murder. The family's lawyer, however, is not hopeful that the review will turn out a different result given that the judges who sit on the review panel are the same ones who ruled in favor of Sheikh's acquittal.

The U.S. government said that if Sheikh is released, it will seek extradition. Sheikh has been indicted in the United States for Pearl's murder and an additional kidnapping charge related to a 1994 incident. Prior to Pearl's murder, Sheikh was arrested in India following the kidnapping of an American citizen in Kashmir. However, he was freed several years later in an exchange for the hostages aboard an Indian Airlines flight that was hijacked by the Taliban. 

An attorney for Sheikh said that the ordering of his client to a safe house occurred to give the Sindh government time to argue against his release under Pakistan's anti-terrorism law. Sheikh will remain under 24-hour surveillance and will not be allowed to leave the house. 

The lawyer for the Pearl family explained that back in 2002, during the original trial, all four terrorists involved in Pearl's murder were charged as one unit, which complicated the legal boundaries of the case, meaning that if the court doubted the guilt of even one of the suspects, it could potentially free all four.

Though the U.S. government says it is fully prepared to prosecute Sheikh, his extradition is not a straightforward matter. As with the U.S. legal system, Pakistan's law prevents an individual from being tried twice for the same crime. Additionally, the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty with Pakistan, though this has in the past been overlooked in the cases of terrorist killers.