ISLAMABAD: A Supreme Court bench on Monday said that the Sindh High Court’s (SHC) decision of overturning the conviction in the American journalist Daniel Pearl murder case could not be cancelled over hypothetical arguments.

A bench of the apex court, headed by Justice Mushir Alam, took up appeal by the provincial government against the acquittal of the convicts.

Justice Qazi Ameen, a member of the bench, told government of Sindh counsel Farooq H Naek, to present the case facts in a sequence adding that the high court decision could not be overturned over hypotheses.

The Sindh government has filed an appeal against the Sindh High Court’s (SHC) April 02 verdict of overturning the conviction of four convicts in Daniel Pearl murder case.

Farooq H Naek, in his arguments said that an email dated January 23, 2002 referred Danial Pearl’s kidnapping for ransom. A taxi driver Nasir Abbas identified the accused before a magistrate. Key accused Omer Saeed Sheikh was arrested on February 13, 2002. Charges were framed against the accused on April 22, 2002, the government counsel said.

An anti-terrorism court of Hyderabad, had awarded death sentence to key accused Omer Saeed Sheikh on July 15 in 2002, on the charges of kidnapping and killing the US journalist, while his three accomplices Fahad Naseem, Syed Salman Saqib and Sheikh Muhammad Adil were handed life sentence with a fine of Rs 600,000 each.

The ATC had also directed the convicts to pay Rs two million to the victim’s widow, Marianne Pearl. The state had filed an appeal seeking the life terms of three convicts to be converted in death sentence. Daniel Pearl, a reporter of The Wall Street Journal, went missing in Karachi in January 2002 while he was working on a story. He was later found to be abducted and beheaded.

An Al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in March 2007, at a closed military hearing in Guantánamo Bay, claimed that he had personally beheaded the US journalist. NNI