British suspect in kidnap case could be extradited to US

The British-born chief suspect in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl may be extradited to America, it emerged tonight.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is being investigated by an American grand jury which is looking into his role in kidnapping of Pearl and other plots involving US citizens going back to 1994.

Extradition proceedings could begin within weeks to bring Saeed to trial in the United States, Newsweek magazine reported.

Saeed, from Wanstead, east London, is currently in Pakistani police custody in Karachi where he told a court Pearl was dead, a claim which Pakistani officials have dismissed.

The 27-year-old ex-public schoolboy dropped out of the London School of Economics and travelled to Pakistan, where he has been linked to a string of hostage-takings.

He was arrested in India in 1994 for kidnapping British backpackers in the disputed region of Kashmir following a gun battle in which police wounded Saeed and freed the hostages unharmed.

Five years later he was released from jail, where he had been held without trial, after gunmen hijacked an Indian Airlines jet in Afghanistan and demanded the release of the British citizen and two other militants.

He is a member of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant Islamic group with ties to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network, and which had covert support from Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, until it was banned by the country’s president, General Pervez Musharraf.

Today Newsweek reported that a senior Pakistani official said he was probably an ISI ‘‘asset’’ when he surrendered on February 5 to intelligence agency.

The source claimed the ISI held Saeed for a week while it tried to make a deal for Pearl’s safe release and only turned the British citizen over to police when the deal failed to happen.

Saeed stunned Pakistani officials by revealing in court he had surrendered to the ISI a week before his ‘‘arrest’’ was announced by the country’s government, which Newsweek reported had left the FBI ‘‘furious’’.

The American agency is helping the hunt to find Pearl and was involved in the arrest of two suspects in the Punjab on Saturday.