“A British-born Muslim militant admitted Thursday to kidnapping Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and said he believed the journalist is dead,” The Washington Post reports. “Officials dismissed the militant’s claim, and the Journal said it remained confident Pearl is alive.”

‘As far as I understand, he’s dead,’ Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh said in a courthouse in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, where Pearl disappeared on Jan. 23 while investigating a story on Islamic militants. Saeed said he carried out the kidnapping of ‘my own free will,’ adding: ‘I don’t want to defend this case. I did this.’

The 27-year-old Saeed has a history of kidnapping Westerners. He appeared in court Thursday sullen, bespectacled and surrounded by police with machine guns, helmets and bulletproof vests.

Which raises the question, what was a man with “a history of kidnapping Westerners” doing running around Pakistan to begin with? But I digress…

[…]Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Aziz Khan also denied Saeed’s claims.

‘This gentleman has been making several statements and changing these statements,’ he told reporters Thursday. ‘We cannot give any credence to any of these statements that he gives.’

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