Share this story!            

Omer Sheikh dangerous and charismatic: prison officials

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Accoring to prison officals, Ahmed Omer Saeed Sheikh is dangerous and charismatic. The British-born Islamist murderer of the American journalist Daniel Pearl has managed to convert the first four constables that were stationed outside his cell. This has moved prison authorities to rotate the guards staioned outside his cell almost every day. “He is capable of converting the entire jail staff,” said one official.

The convict paid tribute to Osama Bin Laden and condemned his victim as an “informer/spy of America” in an interview conducted by smuggling notes in and out of his cell, says a Telegraph report.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh said that he had met Bin Laden twice in Afghanistan and admitted to The Sunday Telegraph that he had been “involved” in the kidnap of Mr Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded on video in 2002 after being lured to a meeting in Karachi.

Sheikh rejected the “pillars of Western civilisation”, pledged allegiance to the one-eyed fugitive Taliban leader Mulla Omar and declared that jihad would never cease, even if Bin Laden and Omar were killed. “Islamic resurgence will continue even if all the better-known leaders are martyred or captured,” he said. His uncompromising pronouncements came as Mr Pearl’s parents, Judea and Ruth, noted with “sadness and disappointment” the failure of Pakistan to carry out Sheikh’s death sentence, imposed three years ago after he was tried for their son’s kidnap, and suggested that he could be implicated in planning bombings in London and elsewhere.

“Using the protection of his jail cell, [Sheikh] reportedly keeps in touch with his friends and followers in Pakistan and Britain, and advises them on future courses of action,” they wrote in the Journal.

A source close to those holding Sheikh, who is in an isolation cell in Hyderabad prison, said that he had limited means of communication with the outside world and was allowed visits only from his wife and father.

In the interview, the first he has given, he wrote out replies to questions submitted covertly while he was in Adiala jail, where he was detained for several months, he indicated that he believed he would never be executed and would one day play a role in an Islamist state in Pakistan or elsewhere.

“I’m trying to prepare myself to be of real service to the ‘Ummah’ [Muslim nation] if I get another chance.” Sheikh, who was educated in England until he was 14 and returned to study at the London School of Economics three years later, said that the United Nations actions in Bosnia propelled him from being a moderate Muslim to a radical Islamist.

“It was the unjust armed embargo perpetuated by the European members of the United Nations on Bosnia’s Muslims while they were being slaughtered in the most horrific way by Serbian forces that made me realise that the pillars of Western civilisation are not for us Muslims.

“I was left with a great emptiness. The ensuing search for new pillars, new directions, new meaningfulness in life, took me to Bosnia, then Pakistan, then Afghanistan and a number of organisations, and finally I found the answer.” His motto in jail was: “Talk less, eat less, sleep less.”

Home | National

Share this story!