Kidnapped reporter's wife pleads to captors

NEW YORK - The wife of kidnapped American reporter Daniel Pearl has urged his captors to let him go or give word on his condition, after the chief suspect in the case told an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan that he thought the Wall Street Journal correspondent was dead.

"I want to appeal again to you to please release him or at least let me know how he is doing," Mariane Pearl said in a statement issued by the Wall Street Journal.

Mariane Pearl is six months pregnant with the couple's first child, a boy.

Pearl's wife said her husband was an innocent man, "a journalist who has come to you as a guest with an open mind and the sole objective of writing about your views for a global audience".

It was the latest of several appeals made by the newspaper and Pearl's wife since the 38-year-old reporter went missing in Pakistan more than three weeks ago.

At an anti-terrorism court in Karachi, British-born Islamic militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh calmly confessed to the abduction of Pearl in Karachi on January 23.

"As far as I understand, he is dead," the bespectacled and clean-shaven man, commonly known as Sheikh Omar, told the court.

The chief prosecutor in the case, Raja Qureshi, expressed caution."Whatever he said, I cannot trust this statement because he was not under oath," Qureshi said.

Omar Sheikh, the son of a wealthy Pakistani businessman, did well enough at his studies to get in to the London School of Economics, where he studied mathematics and statistics. He was a brilliant chess player, competed in the world arm-wrestling championships, and writes smooth and expressive English. But he also has a fiendish temper, a fatal addiction to showing off and a determination to impress that suggests he never truly escaped adolescence.

When Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, the main demand was completely unrealistic - Pakistani citizens held by the US in Guantanamo Bay to be returned for trial in Pakistan - but couched in the language of undergraduate debate.

The Pakistani authorities were baffled. But for those who had followed Omar Sheikh's career, all the signs pointed in his direction: the reckless exhibitionism, the literary flourishes, the desire to be recognised both as a fearsome holy warrior and a man of wit and sophistication.

His parents emigrated to Britain in the 1960s, and Sheikh was born in London during December 1973.

At Forest School, a public school in Snaresbrook, Essex, Sheikh was brilliant but prickly. A contemporary remembers him coming out of chapel one day when he was about 10, declaring, "Well that was crap."

When a classmate responded, "Your religion is crap," Omar chased him around the cricket field for the rest of the break.

In 1987, when Omar was 13, his father wound up his garment business in London and moved back to Lahore. What Sheikh went through in his parents' homeland is unclear, but Indian agents who interrogated him in the mid-1990s said he became known for his temperamental behaviour.

Back at Forest School in the sixth form, his fellow students found him changed. "He claimed he had hijacked buses and was the schoolboy boxing champion of Pakistan," the contemporary, who requested anonymity, recalled.

"He talked to no-one [and] most people avoided talking to him . . . unless they were prepared for a long, opinionated diatribe."

A trip to Bosnia in 1993, ostensibly working for an Islamic charity, seems to have confirmed him in his new direction. Later that year, he flew to Pakistan and trained as an Islamic militant at a camp in Afghanistan.

Omar's first big test came in July 1994 when he flew to Delhi. His mission: To kidnap westerners, preferably Americans, to force India to release a leading militant, Maulana Masood Azhar. He succeeded brilliantly, snaring four luckless backpackers, three British and one American, and leading them up to a remote mountain district where they were held captive. A tipoff led Indian police to the hideout, and all four were released unharmed.

- INDEPENDENT