Hyderabad, Pakistan ? Sentenced to hang for the kidnap-murder of a Wall Street Journal reporter, a British-born Islamic militant threatened Pakistan’s rulers Monday and warned that the battle lines between Muslims and non-Muslims have been drawn.

“We shall see who will die first, me or the authorities who have arranged the death sentence for me,” Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh said in a statement read by a defense lawyer after the court convicted him and three accomplices in the killing of journalist Daniel Pearl.

President Pervez Musharraf should know “Allah is there and can get his revenge,” said Saeed, a 28-year-old former student at the London School of Economics. “Everybody is showing whether he is in favor of Islam or … non-Muslims,” in the jihad (holy war).

The trial has enraged Pakistan’s Islamic militant movement, which considers Musharraf a traitor for backing the United States in the war against terrorism.

Saeed and his co-defendants Salman Saqib, Fahad Naseem and Shaikh Adil sat motionless as Judge Ali Ashraf Shah announced his verdict.

All four men were convicted of murder, kidnapping, conspiracy to kidnap and tampering with evidence. Saeed’s three accomplices got life sentences which in Pakistan means 25 years in prison.

Defense lawyers said they would appeal, a process that could take months or years. The last prominent Islamic extremist to be executed in Pakistan, Haq Nawaz, was hanged Feb. 28, 2001, for killing an Iranian diplomat a decade earlier.

The Pakistani president has the authority to commute sentences to life.

The 38-year-old Pearl disappeared Jan. 23 in Karachi while researching Pakistan’s Islamic extremist community, including possible links to Richard C. Reid, arrested in December on a flight from Paris to Miami with explosives in his shoes.

Prosecutors said Saeed lured Pearl into a trap by promising to arrange an interview with an Islamic cleric who police believe was not involved in the conspiracy.

The defendants were also collectively fined $32,000. Chief prosecutor Raja Quereshi said the money would go to Pearl’s widow, Mariane, and their son, who was born after his father was killed.

U.S. officials welcomed the verdict, but the U.S. Embassy was on a heightened security alert. U.S. grand juries have indicted Saeed in the Pearl case and in the 1994 kidnapping in India of an American who was released unharmed.

“This is a further example of Pakistan showing leadership in the war against terror,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Monday.

The Pearl family, in a statement posted on its Web site, said they were “grateful for the tireless efforts” by U.S. and Pakistani authorities “to bring those guilty of Danny’s kidnapping and murder to justice.”

Saeed’s father, Ahmed Saeed Sheikh, proclaimed his son’s innocence and described the trial as a painful ordeal. “It’s a horrible feeling,” he said.

In London, Saeed’s brother, Awais Sheikh, termed the conviction a “grotesque miscarriage of justice” and said the family “will not stand by and let one of its members be executed for a crime he did not commit.”

The prosecution presented 23 witnesses, including taxi driver Nasir Abbas, who testified he saw Pearl get into a car with Saeed in front of a Karachi restaurant on the night the reporter vanished. The defense claimed the government coached the witness.

The defense produced only two character witnesses, Saeed’s father and uncle.

The United Jehad Council, an organization of 15 Islamic militant groups, said the verdict “will definitely add to the hatred against America.”

Although Pakistani authorities braced for a violent backlash, there were no reports of protests in the country late Monday.