The charming kidnapper

He has been described as a charming man and a model student.
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had a privileged upbringing in England, before his transformation into the radical Islamic militant who is now prime suspect in the hunt for kidnapped U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl.
After dropping out of the London School of Economics, Sheikh Omar, as he became known, shot to prominence in 1994 for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping of three Britons and an American tourist in India.
Omar used his charm and his perfect English to lure his prey away from New Delhi and to a remote village in the interior.
Then he sprung his trap. Suddenly, his captors said, Omar was a transformed man, tying his victims to a stake and threatening to behead them one by one unless Indian authorities released two Islamic militants fighting for an end to Indian rule in Kashmir.
The four were freed after 10 days of captivity in a shootout in which a kidnapper and two policemen were killed. Pearl`s kidnap has some of the same hallmarks. The Wall Street Journal reporter was also lured into what investigators have described as a perfect trap.
Omar and his associates spent several days winning Pearl`s confidence, pretending they were trying to arrange a meeting with an elusive Islamic radical leader.
Finally, they called Pearl on his mobile phone and asked for an urgent meeting outside a restaurant on a busy street in southern Karachi. But instead of taking him to see elusive radical Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, they took Pearl into captivity.
In the following week, emails were sent showing Pearl bound in chains and with a gun to his head. He would be killed, his captors said, unless the United States released its prisoners from the Afghan war. Comfortable background

The son of a wholesale clothes merchant from Wanstead in east London, Omar was born in 1974.
He attended the prestigious, fee-paying Forest School in north London, where teachers described him as an "all-round and supportive" pupil, who became a house prefect.
"He was in the premier league of students, there was absolutely nothing there, no sign whatsoever of this (militancy)," said Omar`s economics teacher, George Paynter.
Omar was captured in 1994 after fight with an Indian policeman on the outskirts of New Delhi and accused of involvement in the tourist kidnaps.
During his interrogation he told police he had been disturbed by ethnic strife in the Balkans and went to Croatia in 1993 with a relief organisation called the "The Convoy of Mercy". There he met Islamic activists and soon after went to Pakistan, linking up with a militant group and receiving training at a guerrilla camp in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Indian investigators say Omar left a 35-page handwritten diary in his cell at the high-security Delhi jail where he was held for five years.
The diary covers the period leading up to the kidnap, and tells of his excitement during his gradual immersion in the radical Islamic cause. On the prowl
The diary says Omar arrived in Delhi from the Pakistani city of Lahore in July 1994 and looked to befriend Americans, Britons and French, in that order.
"Every place I visited I analysed from various points of view as a future conqueror -- as I fondly imagined myself to be," the text says. Once he had his captives he took photographs.
"I remembered the Beirut hostages incidents some years back and how pictures of the hostages with newspapers in the background used to be issued," the diary says.
One of the first photographs of Pearl in captivity shows him holding a copy of Pakistan`s Dawn newspaper.
Omar and other top militants were freed from an Indian jail in 1999, in exchange for 155 hostages held on an Indian airliner hijacked to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
Omar slipped back
Bureau Report