9/11 suspect claims beheading of US journalist

WASHINGTON: Top Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed to have beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl "with my blessed right hand," according to a transcript released by the Pentagon on Thursday.   

Mohammed confessed to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and more than two dozen other attacks and plots in the same closed-door hearing at Guantanamo Bay US military base in Cuba on March 10.   

But Mohammed's personal role in killing Pearl, whose videotaped beheading shocked the world in 2002, was deleted from the transcript until his family had been notified, said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman.   

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," Mohammed said in a statement he wrote, which was read to the hearing by a military officer representing him.   

"For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head," he said.   

In an oral statement, Mohammed said Pearl's beheading was not an Al-Qaeda operation.   

"It's like beheading Daniel Pearl," he said. "It's not related to Al-Qaeda. It was shared in Pakistani. Other group, Mujahedeen."   

Pearl, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, was abducted and beheaded in Karachi in January 2002 while researching a story about Islamic militants.   

A British-born Islamic militant, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani court for the murder in June 2002, but has appealed the verdict.