ARAB-US RELATIONS - Oct. 21 - Captured Qaeda Leader Killed Pearl, US Says.

Officials says that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, once Qaeda's top operational commander, personally executed Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted in Pakistan early last year. Mohammed had previously been linked to a militant group believed to have committed the murder. "We do believe that he was personally responsible for killing Pearl," a US official says, confirming a report on Pearl's killing that was first published in Oct. 21 editions of The Wall Street Journal. The official did not say precisely what information had led to the conclusion that it was Mohammed who took Pearl's life by cutting his throat. Nor would the official say whether Mohammed had confessed to the murder in a series of interrogations conducted since March, when he was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Other officials said that Mohammed, who is being held at an undisclosed location as a suspected terrorist, might be charged with Pearl's murder at a military tribunal. However, they said that he is unlikely to be accused of the crime in an US criminal court because of the risk of divulging classified information. Pearl, the Wall Street Journal's South Asia bureau chief, vanished in Karachi on Jan. 23, 2002 while he was researching an article about Islamic extremism. Some time later, investigators obtained a videotape that graphically showed Pearl's death at the hands of a person whose face was not visible. Pearl's body was not found until that May. An extremist group, which referred to itself as the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, an Islamic militant with a history of kidnapping foreigners, as a prime suspect in Pearl's abduction. In July 2002, a Pakistani antiterrorism court sentenced Saeed to death for his role in the kidnapping. He is appealing that sentence. Three other Islamic extremists were found guilty of aiding in the conspiracy to abduct Pearl. Each of them was sentenced to a term of 25 years in prison. There has been doubt about the convictions reached by the special terrorism courts in Pakistan. But some terror experts have said that Mohammed was well positioned to serve as a coordinator between Qaeda and Pakistani militant groups, like the one believed to have carried out Pearl's killing. Mohammed, who attended university in the US , has been widely suspected by American intelligence and law enforcement authorities as one of the chief architects of the September 2001 attacks, but until now he was believed to have clung to the shadows, giving orders and organizing personnel but leaving others to carry out his extremist plots.