Terror Behind Bars

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When a Pakistani judge ordered the death penalty for Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh in July 2002 for the murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, the Islamic militant was defiant. In court Sheikh had his lawyer read a threat to Pakistan's President: "Let's see who dies first, me or Musharraf." Now, after two bomb attempts in December on President Pervez Musharraf's life, investigators are treating Sheikh's warning as more than just bravado. Most of the dozen or so plotters who twice placed bombs on Musharraf's motorcade route belonged to Jaish-e-Muhammad, an outlawed militant group of which Sheikh was a top member and which had ties to al-Qaeda, according to Islamabad sources familiar with the case.

Sheikh, 30, the British-raised scion of an influential Pakistani family, is being interrogated about his links to the suspected bombers. And he has been abruptly transferred from his prison cell in Hyderabad, in southern Pakistan, to Rawalpindi, near the army headquarters where the assassination probe is being conducted. The switch was made after a search of his cell found evidence that Sheikh, while imprisoned, had kept tabs on his old terrorist gang through letters and cell phone conversations, a Hyderabad police official told TIME. Sheikh had also been allowed visits from his former radical-Islamic comrades, this official says.

Was a high-profile criminal allowed to run a terrorist network from behind bars? Pakistani authorities won't comment, nor will they admit that the suspected contacts were the reason Sheikh was moved. An Interior Ministry official says Sheikh was moved because of fears that members of his terrorist group had bribed guards at Hyderabad prison and were plotting to spring their leader.

--By Tim McGirk and Ghulam Hasnain