Associated Press
KARACHI, Pakistan — The key suspect in the disappearance here of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl may have fled to Pakistan’s most populous province, police said Saturday, insisting they still hope to free Pearl soon.
Kamal Shah, chief of police in Sindh province, said Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh may have left Karachi and "was reported to be in the Punjab" — a sprawling province that runs along Pakistan’s border with India. He said investigators were trying to track Saeed.
"We feel we are close," he said. "We can’t give you a time frame. But we don’t think we are far off."
Pearl, the newspaper’s 38-year-old South Asian bureau chief, was abducted Jan. 23 en route to a meeting with Muslim extremist contacts. Police believe Saeed, a British-born Islamic militant, masterminded the kidnapping.
Separately, a man has confessed to involvement in the execution-style roadside killings of four international journalists in November, an Afghan official said Saturday.
The man was still being questioned, said an aide to Interior Minister Younous Qanooni, and it is believed he could identify others involved in the attack.
The four journalists were shot at close range on Nov. 19 after gunmen stopped their car on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road that runs from the eastern city of Jalalabad to the capital, Kabul.
They were Reuters photographer Aziz Haidari, a native of Afghanistan who had been living in Pakistan; Harry Burton, an Australian cameraman for Reuters TV; Maria Grazia Cutuli, a journalist for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera; and Julio Fuentes, a journalist for the Spanish daily El Mundo.
Meanwhile, a Tajik warlord believed to have ordered the 1998 killings of four U.N. workers has been captured in Afghanistan, an official said Saturday.
Mullo Abdullo, a rebel warlord in Tajikistan’s 1992-1997 civil war, was captured last fall near Kandahar and is being held in a prison in the northern Afghan city of Taloqan, a high-ranking Tajik Security Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
Tajik officials say Abdullo was behind the killings of three U.N. military observers and their Tajik translator in July 1998. Three men were sentenced to death for the killings in 1999, but officials said they acted on Abdullo’s orders.
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