Karachi - An appeal by a British-born Islamic militant sentenced to death for killing US reporter Daniel Pearl got underway Monday at a court in Pakistan after a delay of more than four years.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, also known as Sheikh Omar, was convicted by an anti-terrorism court of involvement in the Wall Street Journal correspondent's January 2002 abduction and murder in the southern city of Karachi.

He lodged his appeal at the high court of Pakistan's southern Sindh province a month after the June 2002 verdict, but the case has been adjourned more than 40 times.

"The entire defense team is there" and had begun to present their case to the judge, public prosecutor Raja Qureshi told reporters outside the court in Karachi.

Sheikh Omar, 32, was not in court for the hearing. He is being kept at a high-security jail in the city, but his father was present, a witness in the court said.

Defense lawyers opened their argument by telling the panel of two judges that the verdict was unfair because they had not been able to interview Pearl's widow Mariane.

"I am confident that the appeal against the verdict will be accepted and the accused will be free," defense counsel Khwaja Sultan said after the proceedings were adjourned until Tuesday. "It will be day-to-day hearings and I will take three days to complete my argument," Sultan said.

The court will later hear a prosecution move that seeks to convert the life sentences received by three other men convicted alongside Sheikh Omar to death sentences.

Lawyers say that they expect the hearing to take about a week although the judges may defer their decision.

Pearl disappeared in Karachi January 23, 2002, while working on a story about the murky underworld of Pakistani militant groups. A graphic video depicting his decapitation was later delivered to the US consulate.

Omar Sheikh was arrested soon afterwards. His father, Saeed Sheikh, last week demanded a ban on the screening of a film loosely based on the Pearl case at a movie festival in Karachi, which opened Friday, Omar's lawyer Mohsin Imam said.

In September Omar's lawyer said that he would use President Pervez Musharraf's new memoirs in the appeal because the book indicates that alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Shekih Mohammed and another man had killed Pearl.

Sheikh Omar said in a rare jail-cell interview with a Pakistani magazine last year that he met Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden twice in Afghanistan.