Mr Sheikh, who is on trial with three others in a closed and heavily guarded courtroom, told Judge Abdul Ghafor Memon that he rejected the court’s authority, according to a lawyer representing two of Mr Sheikh’s co-defendants, Khawaja Naveed Ahmed. “He pleaded not guilty and said, ‘I don’t recognise this law and I only accept sharia [Islamic] law,” Mr Naveed told reporters outside the court. Raja Qureshi, the chief prosecutor, said the judge gave Mr Sheikh’s complaint short shrift and told him: “You are being tried under the law of the land.”When he was abducted in January, Mr Pearl, South Asia correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, was investigating possible links between the al-Qa’ida terror group and Richard Reid, the Briton alleged to have tried to blow up a transatlantic flight with explosive hidden in his shoes.Several days later, e-mails were received by international media organisations from a previously unheard of group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, with attached photographs showing Mr Pearl with a gun held to his head. The e-mails demanded that Pakistani nationals being held by America at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp be returned for trial in Pakistan, as well as the honouring of an American agreement to deliver F-16 fighter aircraft to the Pakistani Air Force. Washington made clear there was no room for negotiation.On 21 February, almost a month after the journalist’s disappearance, the US deputy high commission in Karachi received a videotape, which showed Mr Pearl’s throat being cut and his decapitated head.Mr Sheikh had been arrested 10 days beforehand, though he claimed that one week before his formal arrest he turned himself in at the home of Brigadier Ejaz Shah, the top bureaucrat in Punjab province and formerly a senior officer in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency.Nasir Abbas, the taxi driver, told the court in Karachi that he picked up Mr Pearl from a house in the city on the day he disappeared and drove him to a location outside a hotel. He said he saw a white car pull up, and then Mr Sheikh “called to Pearl and Pearl got into the car, which whisked him away”, according to the account of the defence lawyer, Mr Naveed.Mr Sheikh has been linked not only to the Pearl case but also to Osama bin Laden. It has been claimed that a large sum of money sent to Mr Sheikh from the Gulf, part of the proceeds from the kidnapping of a businessman in Calcutta, was forwarded a few weeks before the 11 September attacks to Mohamed Atta, the hijacker who piloted the first plane into the World Trade Centre.Mr Sheikh is suspected of having close links with the ISI, which before 11 September was the financial and military mainstay of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.

It could explain why Mr Sheikh surrendered to a former ISI officer. And it would also help to account for Pakistan’s reluctance to see Mr Sheikh extradited to the US. A federal grand jury has indicted him but President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler, told the US ambassador to Pakistan that he would “rather hang Sheikh myself than have him extradited”.The trial continues.. The head of the international body regulating chemical weapons inspections was forced from his post yesterday after an American-led campaign to oust him. Last week it brought about the replacement of the head of the UN’s climate advisory body, an outspoken critic of America’s energy policy. The US delegation said Mr Bustani had mismanaged and undermined the credibility of OPCW, established in 1997 to oversee the destruction of chemical weapons.

It said that if Iraq joined, any new weapons inspections would be too soft.America also accused Mr Bustani of threatening inspections in five unspecified countries “for political ends” – an accusation he dismissed.An unlikely group of celebrities including the singer Robbie Williams, the artist Damien Hirst and the television presenter Jonathan Ross signed a letter to a British newspaper this week arguing that Britain should support Mr Bustani.Some experts believe Mr Bustani was a divisive figure. Amy Smithson, the director of the chemical and biological nonproliferation project at the Henry Stimson Centre research organisation in Washington, said the vote to remove him had been a “most unfortunate episode”.. The telecoms industry was dealt a further blow yesterday after it emerged that almost 800 jobs are going at two former Marconi factories in Coventry and Liverpool. It is yet more evidence of the crisis in manufacturing and in particular in telecoms.”Marconi, which has cut thousands of jobs over the past year as part of a desperate fight for survival, sold five operations to Jabil for about £260m last year.As part of the deal, the US-based company, which also bought Marconi sites in Italy, Germany and the US, agreed to continue manufacturing products for Marconi.. John Wood, the oil services company, yesterday gave further evidence that the City’s appetite for new issues is returning when it announced its own £1bn flotation for the end of next month. It aims to raise $200m (£141m) of new money to fund acquisitions and to reduce its $300m of debt.The family-run company, which is based in Aberdeen, has almost doubled in size in the past two years and aims to become a global force in the oil field services industry in the future.The company stressed that it would be in line with best practice for public companies once it floats. Sir Ian Wood, currently chairman and chief executive, will hand over the role of chief executive to Allister Langlands, currently deputy chief executive, within the next two years.The Wood family will also reduce its stake from 65 per cent to 45 per cent, which will allow them to pocket £50m on flotation.While institutional investors will receive another 45 per cent and staff and management 10 per cent, it may still concern investors that the chairman and his family control such a large chunk of the company.Wood’s move to list on the Stock Exchange follows a couple of other high profile floats, after 18 months of the market being very quiet.