On Thursday, a panel of three people who call themselves judges ordered the release of the man convicted of orchestrating the kidnapping and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl — with the insulting coda that the reasons will “be recorded later.” America must not rest until this Pakistani travesty is corrected.
Pearl, a 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter and a very good man, disappeared 19 years ago in Karachi on his way to what he thought was an interview with a radical Muslim cleric. Terrorists abducted him and issued ransom demands. Nineteen years ago, on Feb. 1, 2002, Pearl was beheaded on camera, after uttering these words: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”
In 2002, Pakistani courts convicted Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national with a record of other kidnappings, of orchestrating the abduction and killing. He and three accomplices were locked away — until last spring, when a lower court overturned their convictions, pending the appeal that just failed at the nation’s Supreme Court.
By no accounting are Sheikh and the other three the sole guilty parties here. A 31,000-word report by a Georgetown faculty-research investigative project released in 2011 fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind now rotting in Guantanamo Bay, for the murder, while detailing an astonishing 26 accomplices. The most charitable way to frame Sheikh’s crimes is that he only abducted Pearl, serving him up to his eventual slaughterers.
The image of him walking free cannot be the end. The Biden administration, reiterating a demand made by the Trump administration, seeks to extradite Sheikh from Pakistan to try him on a 2002 indictment by a New Jersey grand jury. All who mouth platitudes about protecting journalists, about countering violent jihadism, about standing up to anti-Semitism: This is your fight. Echo the call.