HYDERABAD: The Hyderabad anti-terrorism court has acquitted an accused in the 2002 US journalist Daniel Pearl kidnapping and murder case for want of evidence over nine years after his arrest, officials said on Friday.

ATC Judge Abdul Ghafoor Memon acquitted Qari Mohammad Hashim alias Arif on Thursday night by allowing an acquittal application moved by the defence under Section 265-K (power of court to acquit accused at any stage) of the criminal procedure code.

The accused was facing trial inside the Hyderabad central prison. The charge against the accused was that he had arranged a meeting between the US journalist and a cleric, Mubarak Shah Gilani, in Rawalpindi.

Defence counsel Sher Mohammad Leghari took the plea that the charges against his client were groundless and with no evidence.

Pleading for his acquittal, the counsel submitted that the trial would not lead to his conviction in the case and, therefore, he might be acquitted at this stage of the trial.

District Public Prosecutor Nasir Durrani opposed the acquittal plea at this stage and submitted that he wanted to examine more witnesses.

Later, defence counsel Leghari told Dawn over the phone that one of the prosecution witnesses, journalist Asif Mahfooz Farooqui, had on April 8, 2013 deposed that he could recognise Qari Hashim, who he said had arranged a meeting between Pearl and Gilani, from his voice as he used to talk to him over the phone.

Advocate Leghari said that a voice test of the accused was conducted in court, but the witness Farooqui submitted that he was not the same accused.

He said that he also argued that since the prosecution witnesses examined earlier in the main case did not mention his client’s name, the position with regard to his role would remain unchanged even if they were examined again by the ATC. Therefore, there was no purpose of keeping him in jail, the defence counsel said.

Prosecutor Durrani was, however, not available for his comments.

According to the prosecution, Qari Mohammad Hashim alias Arif, son of Qari Abdul Qadir, was arrested on Aug 6, 2005 in Karachi.

The South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl, went missing in Karachi on Jan 23, 2002 while researching a story on Islamic militants in Pakistan. His kidnappers killed him and sent a graphic video of his decapitation to the US consulate in Karachi one month after his kidnapping. Four months later, his dismembered body was found on the outskirts of Karachi.

A case was lodged at the Artillery Maidan police station and police managed to arrest four men — British-born Ahmed Omer Saeed Shaikh, commonly known as Shaikh Omer, Fahad Nasim, Sheikh Adil and Syed Salman Saqib — for their alleged involvement in the case.

The Sindh government had notified a jail trial against the four men. The case was heard by ATC Judge Syed Ali Ashraf Shah inside the Hyderabad central prison and on July 15, 2002 the trial court handed down capital punishment to Shaikh Omer and life imprisonment to the remaining three accused.

Since then, their appeals against conviction are pending in the Sindh High Court. The state also moved the high court seeking enhancement of the sentences of the three co-accused. The convicts are kept in different prisons of the province due to security concerns. Sheikh Omer is kept in the Hyderabad central prison, Fahad Nasim in Sukkur, while Sheikh Adil and Salman Saqib are in the Karachi central prison.

Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2014