Daniel Pearl Execution Video: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Killed Pearl

by MROliver | January 20, 2011 at 06:55 pm

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Stills Taken From the Daniel Pearl Execution Video Prove Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Beheaded Pearl on Video Say FBI

The stills and photographs showed the veins in what the FBI says were Khalid Mohammed's hands, who confessed to the beheading of Pearl in 2003 after he was arrested in Pakistan.

However, after the U.S. admitted that Khalid Mohammed had been subjected to waterboarding while in CIA custody, an investigation was launched to test the reliability of his confession.

Mohammed stated again that he had killed Pearl in 2007, during a hearing at Guantanamo Bay. The FBI matched the veins in his hands in 2004 and then again in 2007 after he confessed a second time.

"Beyond KSM's confession, the U.S. government has never revealed any corroborating evidence," the report states. But it called the vein match the "best evidence" the United States has linking Mohammed to Pearl's 2002 slaying.

The FBI had no comment recently on the case, but it did say it is not using the technology at this time according to CNN.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is accused of planning the September 11 attacks, but he has not been charged in Daniel Pearl's death, who was kidnapped in Karachi while he was on his way to interview a radical cleric.

His execution video was widely distributed and searched for online, but the person who killed him cannot be seen in the footage.

According to Thursday's report, his captors were "inept, plagued by bungling plans, a failure to cover their tracks, and an inability to operate cameras and computer equipment." Even the grisly video of Pearl's death had to be restaged, "because the cameraman failed to capture the original scene."

Mohammed moved so quickly to cut Pearl's throat that the photographer failed to load a tape into his camera, according to the report. He repeated the killing for the camera, severing Pearl's head in the process and making sure the photographer showed the blood still pouring through Pearl's throat. The scene "would later turn the stomachs of even the most hardened Pakistani and U.S. investigators," the report states.