A panel of three judges of Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered on Thursday the release of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, an Islamist accused of beheading U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, a government lawyer said.
"By a majority of two to one, they have acquitted all the accused persons and ordered their release," a provincial attorney general, Salman Talibuddin, told Reuters in a text message.
Sheikh, the main suspect in the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter, had received the death penalty.