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KARACHI, Feb 28 (AFP) - Pakistan was considering Thursday US requests to extradite British-born militant Sheikh Omar, the confessed mastermind of slain US reporter Daniel Pearl's abduction, as Washington offered a five-million-dollar reward for information on the journalist's killers.

"Today we are announcing a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction in any country of who is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters Wednesday in Washington.

Police here were continuing to interrogate Omar and two other detained suspects in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of Pearl's body or at least seven other fugitive suspects.

Officials in Karachi Wednesday said they were working on the legal formalities for extraditing Omar but were awaiting formal instructions and information from the federal government.

Washington has stepped up pressure on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to extradite Omar, with US Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin meeting the general and Secretary of State Colin Powell talking with him by telephone.

While there is no formal extradition treaty between them, Pakistan extradited to the United States suspects in the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and outside the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters near Washington.

Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said Pakistan would consider a formal extradition request.

"When they ask us officially we will evaluate the situation. But between Pakistan and America is the UK, whose national Sheikh Omar is," he told AFP in Bali, Indonesia, on the sidelines of a regional people-smuggling conference.

British High Commission (embassy) spokesman Paul O'Neil said he did not know what Omar's nationality status was at present, nor whether he had sought consular assistance.

"If he's a dual national, then any assistance we could give him would be limited in the country of his other nationality," he said.

Asked whether Britain would object to Omar's extradition to the United States, where he could face the death penalty if found guilty of murder, O'Neil said, "This is a matter for the relevant UK authority".

US officials have said they believe a form of extradition treaty signed in 1931 by Washington and local authorities in what was then part of the British empire remains valid.

Omar, who was born in 1973 in London, was Monday ordered remanded in police custody for another two weeks to give police more time to find evidence.

The militant admitted in court February 14 he had masterminded the abduction of the Wall Street Journal correspondent who disappeared on January 23. He also said that the reporter was dead, a claim confirmed a week later when a grisly video surfaced of Pearl's slaying.

Pearl's widow, Mariane, who is seven months pregnant with the couple's first child, met Musharraf in Islamabad Wednesday.

The president expressed his condolences and condemned the "barbaric" killing of her husband, Pakistan Television said.

Musharraf vowed after Pearl's killing to "liquidate terrorists" from Pakistan. He has acknowledged Pearl's abduction may be part of a backlash against his crackdown on Islamic extremists.

Omar, whose full name is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was wanted by the United States even before Pearl's abduction over the kidnapping of an American in India in 1994.

He spent five years in an Indian jail for the kidnapping, in which three Britons were also snatched. He was released in December 1999 in exchange for passengers on a hijacked Indian Airlines plane. 

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