Police in Daniel Pearl Case Dig Up Body

Tests were being carried out last night on a body dug up by police in Pakistan, after a tip-off that it was that of the murdered American journalist Daniel Pearl.

Karachi police are "90% sure" they have uncovered the grave of the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and murdered four months ago.

Three new suspects arrested yesterday led police to Orangi, a shanty town on the outskirts of Karachi. They found the body buried in a field.

Pearl, 38, went missing in Karachi on January 23 as he was researching a story on al-Qaida's links in Pakistan. His death is now thought to have been the first in a series of coordinated attacks against foreigners in Pakistan by Islamist militants opposed to the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan's support for America.

Five people, including a US diplomat and her daughter, were killed in a grenade attack in a church in Islamabad in March. Last week 11 French submarine engineers were killed in a suicide bombing outside a Karachi hotel.

A British-born Islamist militant, Omar Saeed Sheikh, was arrested in February and charged with masterminding Pearl's kidnap. He is now on trial with three Pakistani men at an anti-terrorism court set up in a jail in Hyderabad.

· </B> A London-based Islamist was described yesterday as "an innocent fall guy" by a judge who threw out charges that he had been part of a conspiracy to kill Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan opposition leader assassinated two days before the September 11 attacks.

Yasser al-Siri, an Egyptian who ran the Islamic Observation Centre in Paddington, west London, was accused of being part of a plot to kill Massoud. Mr al-Siri, who had been detained in Belmarsh prison, in south-east London, since his arrest last October, was granted bail but rearrested as he left the dock on an indictment from the US government which is seeking his extradition.