He was released in 1999 and was provided safe passage into Afghanistan with the support of the Taliban in exchange for passengers aboard the hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814.
Saeed's lawyer has stated he will base his client's appeal on the admission of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, made public in 2007, that he is the killer of Daniel Pearl.
[19] Reuters journalist Daniel Flynn, who was a childhood friend, says that he was already an admirer of Pakistan's Islamist dictator General Zia-ul-Haq and returned to London as "a junior boxing champion and full of stories of contacts with organised crime, gun battles in the ghettos of Lahore, visits to brothels.
[24] Becoming an adult, a "burly-chested six feet two inches" as per journalist Robert Sam Anson,[25] he would eventually translate this violence into a love for martial arts and sports, participating in the 1992 World Armwrestling Championship in Geneva, while also being a chess champion during his days at the LSE.
[27] The Guardian reported that Sheikh came into contact with radical Islamists at the LSE, quoting Hasan as saying "[he] told us he was going to Bosnia driving aid convoys, and he never came back to university".
[28] Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, in his book In the Line of Fire, stated that Sheikh was originally recruited by British intelligence agency MI6 while studying at the London School of Economics.
[31][32][33][34] In an interview with Massoud Ansari from Newsline dated April 2005, Omar Shaikh stated that "You can obtain details of my background from the book Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
"[35] He travelled to Bosnia in 1993 during the Bosnian War and met other Pakistani Islamist militants with whom he went to an Afghan training camp and joined the anti-Indian terrorist group Harkat-ul-Ansar.
[a][3] He served five years in prison including the Delhi Tihar Jail in the 1990s in connection with the 1994 kidnappings of Westerners in India perpetrated by the Harkat-ul-Ansar (under the pseudonym of Al-Hadid), during which he had been caught.
[36] The abductees included three British citizens, Myles Croston, Paul Rideout, and Rhys Partridge, and one American, Béla Nuss; all of them were rescued unharmed.
), he was noted as wanting to read biographies of Adolf Hitler and Stalin and described "as a tough, militant youth with a sharp, calculating brain well capable of planning and executing terror acts with precision", while his counsel in Meerut, O.P.
Sharma, remembers him as a "fanatic to the core" who "believed every non-Muslim is a kafir and must perish", that "there was no concept of democracy in Islam" and even that "at times he turned very violent and behaved like a mentally-challenged person" for instance when "he once beat up one of the deputy jailors at Meerut jail.
[36][39] Sheikh also had financial connections with Aftab Ansari, perpetrator of the kidnapping of Partha Pratim Roy Burman and the 2002 attack on American cultural centre in Kolkata.
[40][41] The Times has described Sheikh as "no ordinary terrorist but a man who has connections that reach high into Pakistan's military and intelligence elite and into the innermost circles of Osama Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda organisation."
"[42] In May 2002, The Washington Post quoted an unnamed Pakistani source as saying that the ISI paid Sheikh's legal fees during his 1994 trial in India on charges of kidnapping.
[43] On 6 October 2001, a senior-level US government official, told CNN that US investigators had discovered Sheikh (Sheik Syed), using the alias "Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad" had sent about $100,000 from the United Arab Emirates to Mohamed Atta.
Investigators said "Atta then distributed the funds to conspirators in Florida in the weeks before the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil that destroyed the World Trade Center, heavily damaged the Pentagon and left thousands dead.
In addition, sources have said Atta sent thousands of dollars – believed to be excess funds from the operation – back to Syed in the United Arab Emirates in the days before September 11.
"[49] Sheikh rose to prominence with the 2002 killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who at the time was in Pakistan investigating connections between the ISI and Islamic militant groups.
The beheading video of Pearl was released by Jaish-e-Mohammed, under the pseudonym of "National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty" and Jaish member Amjad Farooqi was reportedly involved in the kidnapping and murder.
[54][55][56] In a January 2011 report prepared by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), members of other Pakistani terrorist groups such as Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan were also stated to be involved in Pearl's kidnapping and murder.