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Pakistani Police Closing in on U.S. Journalist Kidnappers
KARACHI, Feb 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Sheikh Omar, a leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammad group, has emerged as chief suspect behind the kidnapping of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, investigators said Wednesday.
Sources involved in the police investigation said three men arrested here overnight had identified Omar as the source of e-mails containing photographs of Pearl in captivity.
The three arrested are identified only by the names of Fahd, Adil and Salman, reports CNN.
A fourth person was detained in Islamabad .He was believed to have been in telephone contact with the Wall Street Journal correspondent before he disappeared on January 23, was detained in Islamabad, an investigator in the Pakistan capital said.
"They have told investigators that they sent the e-mails with photographs as directed by Sheikh Omar," one investigator said, on condition of anonymity.
He said police later raided Omar's in-laws' house in the eastern city of Lahore and arrested some of his relatives.
The three arrests in this southern port city, where the Wall Street Journal reporter was last seen 14 days ago, could lead to a "breakthrough" in the search, police said.
Karachi police chief Tariq Jamil told Agence France-Press (AFP) that information gleaned from the three detainees during "intense interrogation" indicated for the first time that the kidnapping was the work of a group and not individuals."They are being interrogated and it is not yet completed, but we are quite optimistic that the case will be resolved very soon," he said.
A previously unknown group calling itself the Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty , in two e-mails last week, claimed responsibility for the abduction .
They threatened to kill Pearl by last Thursday, later extending the deadline to Friday, unless Pakistanis captured in Afghanistan and former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef were released from U.S. custody.
The group has not been heard from since . However police assisted by U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, believe Pearl is still alive and being held somewhere in Karachi . Despite the arrests late Tuesday night, the fate of Pearl remained a mystery and there was no evidence he had been in the house raided in Karachi.
Police on Tuesday also named three others - Mohammad Hashim Qadeer, Mohammad Bashir and Imtiaz Siddiqui - as "prime suspects" but they have not been found.
These men were involved in arranging an interview between Pearl, 38, and Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, leader of another little-known Muslim group, Tanzeem-ul-Fuqra. Gilani has also been detained and questioned.
Sheikh Omar, born in England and educated at the London School of Economics, is one of the leading figures in the Jaish-e-Mohammad, although little is known about the 29-year-old from East London.
He has not been seen since he left his Lahore home with his wife and two-month-old child four days before Pearl was abducted.
Omar had been arrested in New Delhi in 1993 after kidnapping three tourists he hoped to swap for jailed Maulana Masood Azhar. Both were freed in 1999 in exchange for hostages on a hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Afghanistan.
Jaish-e-Mohammad grew out of the Harkatul Mujahedin in the months after the Indian Airlines hijacking. Both groups have been outlawed in Pakistan and feature on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
They focused on the jihad, or struggle, against Indian rule in the Muslim-majority Himalayan state of Kashmir, and also had close links to the Taliban and possibly Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan.
More than 30 Pakistani Harkatul fighters were killed in one U.S. bombing raid in Kabul late last year during the U.S.-led war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Jaish-e-Mohammad is one of two groups blamed by India for the December 13 attack on the New Delhi parliament in which 14 people were killed. It has also been accused of the October strike on the Kashmir legislature building which claimed 38 lives.
Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar tempered hopes for a breakthrough in the increasingly desperate search earlier Tuesday."We are really in a very difficult situation, but we are doing our best to try and trace him," he said. "We still hope that he will be found alive and rescued."
Sattar claimed Pearl's own efforts to meet shadowy Muslim groups contributed to his fate.
"He wasn't kidnapped. He went into the lair of this group," he asserted.
The Wall Street Journal issued a plea in New York for his captors to make contact privately with them and prove he is still alive.
"I have not heard from you for several days and want to begin a dialogue that will address your concerns and bring about Danny's safe release," the Journal's managing editor, Paul Steiger, said in a statement.
He urged the captors to contact one of Pearl's close friends by e-mail, letter or telephone."This line of communication would show me that Danny is with you and would allow us one-to-one contact," Steiger wrote.
The last e-mail containing photos of Pearl in captivity were sent last Wednesday, a week after he was kidnapped. He was in Karachi working on a story about Muslim activists.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Kenneth Dam said he was satisfied with the way the investigation was being handled.
"It's a vigorous investigation and I'm quite satisfied with actions taken to date," he said here Tuesday at the end of a two-day visit to Islamabad including talks with President Pervez Musharraf.
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