David Headley & his links with Tahawwur Rana

David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Rana were friends when they were students at Hasan Abdal Cadet College, an elite military school in Pakistan. Later, Tahawwur Rana would provide "cover" for Headley's undercover terrorist reconnaissance activities.

Headley, born in Washington DC as Daood Gilani, is the son of Pakistani broadcaster Syed Saleem Gilani and American Serrill Headley. They moved to Pakistan when David was a baby. Soon, they divorced and Serrill returned to the US. The court proceedings against him in Chicago in 2013 indicated that Daood, alias David, grew up in an "environment of Pakistani nationalism and Islamic conservatism."

According to Headley's accounts, his hatred towards India started in 1971, when during the Indo-Pak war, a stray bomb hit his elementary school in Karachi, killing two persons.

At the age of 17, Headley returned to his mother in Philadelphia as he clashed with his Pakistani stepmother. His brush with the law started in 1988 due to drug addiction in the US, Pakistan and Germany, where he was arrested. From then on, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) recruited him as an informer. In 1998, the DEA sent him to Pakistan as an undercover agent.

During that period, he developed links with Lashkar-e-Taiba. He said that he undertook trips to Pakistan without the permission of the US authorities. In 2000, he met Hafiz Saeed, the spiritual leader of Lashkar. In 2001, he again "signed up" with the DEA for another year of working. That gave him reasons for making frequent trips to the subcontinent.

Sebastian Rotella of 'Pro-Publica' and Prof Stephen Tankhel of the American University were primarily responsible for exposing to the world the secret links between 26/11 terrorist David Coleman Headley, his friend Tahawwur Hussain Rana and the ISI, which official US sources did not publicly indicate earlier.

In 2012, Stephen Tankhel figured along with me when the National Geographic interviewed us for their movie 'Seconds to Disaster: The Mumbai Massacre' on the 26/11 attack. In the same year, he came to Mumbai to launch his master treatise on Lashkar-e-Taiba ('Storming the World Stage') and its close links with Pakistan's ISI, which he gathered through field research in Pakistan and India in 2009. In 2017, he chaired the discussion of my book 'Keeping India Safe' at the National Press Club, Washington DC.

I came to know Sebastian Rotella personally only in June 2013, when he came to Mumbai to record my interview for a sequel of his 2011 documentary film 'A Perfect Terrorist' by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) about Headley's links with the Mumbai and Denmark plots. He was also investigating why US agencies did not alert the Indian authorities about Headley's involvement and frequent trips to India, although a US diplomat had reported this to the FBI, DEA and CIA after interviewing his wife in Islamabad.

In January 2013, Judge Harry Leinenweber of the US Chicago District Court sentenced David Coleman Headley to a 35-year prison sentence for his deep involvement in the Mumbai massacre by way of prior reconnaissance for the attack. Included among the witnesses in Chicago was American author Linda Ragsdale, who was injured during 26/11 attack while two others at her dining table were killed. The court proceedings indicated that Headley, who had earlier confessed under a "plea bargain agreement", had watched the attack on TV from his home in Pakistan.

Headley told the court that he had attended Lashkar training camps in Pakistan five times between 2002 and 2005. In late 2005, he received instructions to travel to India to conduct surveillance, which he did five times.

The court proceedings also indicated Leinenweber's disdain to the prosecution's request for not awarding Headley maximum punishment under the law for his involvement in the "horrific nature of the three-day slaughter in Mumbai." Although US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald requested leniency in view of his "thorough" confession, the judge pointed out that Headley had received two "generous plea bargains" previously. when he was charged with heroin trafficking in the 1980s and 1990s. He said that he was awarding him the long sentence which "will keep him under lock and key for the rest of his natural life."

The proceedings against Tahawwur Rana in 2013 in the same court of Judge Harry Leinenweber of the US Chicago District Court gave proof of the close friendship between him and Headley, especially how Rana's "cover" of travel agency afforded the latter to make frequent trips to India and Pakistan. Rana, who was described as an immigration consultant, "helped Headley conduct undercover terrorist reconnaissance by allowing him to work as an overseas representative of his immigration consulting firm. He also enabled Headley to open an office in Mumbai, use business cards, obtain visas and otherwise maintain a cover."

Judge Harry Leinenweber awarded Rana 14 years in prison for two counts of charges: for providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba's terrorism activities and for being involved in a plot to attack a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. He, however acquitted him of the charge of providing material support to Mumbai 26/11 attacks.

In this, he partially agreed with the jury's finding that they accepted Rana's argument that "he was not aware of the Mumbai plot and that his support of Lashkar did not play a role in that 2008 massacre." However, the judge found that Rana should have been aware of the "murderous potential" of such links after what happened in Mumbai in November 2008. He, therefore, increased the punishment to 14 years from 11 as mandated under the penal law. He also added five years of post-prison supervision to Rana's sentence.

True, Headley was examined online as a witness by a Mumbai court in February 2016 in the case of Abu Jundal. However, Rana's extradition to India affords us to interrogate him on his role in helping Headley in doing the prior reconnaissance.

This is because the Chicago jury's findings do not appear to have been based on the facts which our investigating agencies had provided to their counterparts in the USA. That is why Rana's extradition is important.

Views are personal