A Sindh prosecutor said he would consider appealing against the court decision.

"We will go through the court order once it is issued, we will probably file an appeal," Faiz Shah, the provincial prosecutor general, told the news agency by telephone.

British national Omer Sheikh had been sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing Daniel Pearl by a court in 2002, and his three accomplices - Fahad Naseem, Syed Salman Saqib and Sheikh Mohammad Adil - were sentenced to life imprisonment with a fine of Rs500,000 each.

Pearl, a US national and the South Asian bureau chief of American publication The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped on January 23, 2002, in Karachi and later beheaded by his captors when their demands regarding his release were not met.

The counsel for the defense, Rai Bashir and Khawaja Naveed Ahmed, had submitted to court that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. "Ahmed and the three other suspects had neither aided, abetted, or participated in the alleged crime of kidnapping for ransom," it was argued.

They submitted that the prosecution witnesses in the case against Shiekh and others were mostly...