A British-born Islamic militant, Ahmed Omar Sheikh,...

A British-born Islamic militant, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, and three co-defendants pleaded not guilty to the kidnapping and murder earlier this year of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl as a Pakistani court began hearing the trial.
The other men on trial were Salman Saqib, Fahad Naseem and Sheikh Muhammad Adeel.One by one, from behind a barred enclosure, the handcuffed defendants answered, "No," when asked by the judge if they pleaded guilty, according to lawyers who were present.
'He pleaded not guilty and said 'I don't recognise this law and I only accept Shariat Law,' Sheik's lawyer said.The charges - murder, kidnapping for ransom and terrorist activities - carry the death penalty.
The press and public have been barred from the high-profile trial, which is being conducted by a special antiterrorism court inside the secure walls of Karachi's central jail.
The makeshift courtroom is heavily guarded but nearly empty, with only three relatives of defendants permitted to attend as spectators.After they entered their plea, the prosecutor, Raja Qureshi, called his first witness, a taxi driver who said he drove Pearl to a meeting with Sheikh on the evening of Jan. 23, the day the reporter disappeared. Sheikh's lawyer raised a suggestion that the entire testimony was a fabrication.
Pearl, who was the South Asia correspondent for his newspaper, disappeared while researching possible Pakistani connections to Richard C. Reid, a Briton who was arrested in December 2001 on an airliner with explosives in his shoe. The accusation against Sheikh is that he deceived the reporter by promising to arrange a clandestine interview with an Islamic militant leader.
Qureshi, the prosecutor, said he planned to call 30 more witnesses, including two F.B.I. agents and Marianne Pearl, Mr. Pearl's widow.President Pervez Musharraf, who was badly embarrassed by his government's failure to rescue Pearl, has already said he believes that Sheikh is guilty and should be executed. The prosecutor, conceded, however, that he had only circumstantial evidence to implicate Sheik.
Judge Abdul Ghafoor Memon ruled that the cases of seven other defendants who have evaded arrest would be separated from those tried now and would be taken up only if they were captured. Prosecutors say they believe that the actual killer of Pearl is among the absent defendants.