Ex-public school boy 'kidnapped reporter'

A former English public school boy was today being hunted as the suspected mastermind behind the kidnap of US journalist Daniel Pearl.

Pakistani government sources said they were closing in on 27-year-old Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was born in east London. Police believe he was behind emails threatening Mr Pearl's life, who was last seen on 23 January.

FBI agents also believe the former London School of Economics student has links with al Qaeda and could have helped back some of the 11 September hijackers financially.

The revelations followed the arrest of three of Sheikh's friends and relatives yesterday in Karachi. They were identified only as Suleiman, Fawad and Adeel.

Mukhtar Ahmed Sheikh, in charge of police in Sindh province, said: "The fact is we know who has done it and we are very close to resolving the case. But there are questions which, if I answer, could affect the case. It is enough to say that we might conclude the whole thing very soon."

He added that Mr Pearl was still believed to be alive.

Mr Pearl, a 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter, disappeared on his way to meet Muslim fundamentalist cleric Sheik Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani at a Karachi restaurant.

A group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty has claimed to have kidnapped Mr Pearl. However, investigators suspect the outlawed Islamic extremist Harkat ul- Mujahedeen (Movement of Holy War) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (Army of Muhammad).

The possible involvement of Saeed Sheikh points to the two militant groups. Sheikh was freed by India on 31 December 1999 to end a hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight to Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was freed along with Maulana Masood Azhar, a former Harkat ul-Mujahedeen activist who later formed Jaish-e-Mohammed. Azhar is in police custody.

In 1994, Sheikh was shot and imprisoned in India for allegedly being part of a group that abducted British tourists in protest over Indian rule in Kashmir.

Emails sent last week are believed to be the only genuine communication received from the kidnappers. One included photographs of Mr Pearl - one with a gun to his head - in protest at the treatment of Pakistani prisoners held by the US at Camp X-Ray, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The police believe the idiomatic excellence of the English in the emails suggests the involvement of a native English speaker.

Sheikh is the son of wealthy Pakistani parents from Wanstead, who moved to the UK in the Sixties. Their son went to the private Forest School, in Snaresbrook, where England cricket captain Nasser Hussain was a contemporary. He passed four A-levels, two at grade A and two at grade B, and was head of his school house. He went on to study economics and statistics at LSE while his sister went on to Oxford University.

At the time of the tourists' kidnapping in 1994, his father, who ran a textile business, said his son had become "deeply affected" by what had been happening to Muslims in Kashmir and Bosnia.

Meanwhile, Mr Pearl's wife, Mariane, who is six months' pregnant with the couple's first child, has urged the kidnappers to contact her and offered to take her husband's place.

World News