America
Mumbai plotter Headley joined LeT "full time" after 9/11
Mumbai
plotter Headley joined LeT "full time" after 9/11
By Arun
Kumar
Washington, April 22 A Pakistani-American key plotter of the November
2008 Mumbai terror attacks has revealed that he decided to join Pakistani
terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) "full time" following the 9/11
attacks in the US.
Born Daood Gilani in the US to an American mother and a Pakistani father, David
Coleman Headley makes the disclosure in a draft memoir made available to the
makers of an "American Terrorist", a TV documentary telecast Tuesday
night.
Working with LeT, Headley, former drug smuggler turned informant for the US
Drug Enforcement Administration, used his US passport to travel to India, scout
locations for the plot, film them and even find a landing site for the plot's
attackers.
Writing about his first encounter with Lashkar militants, Headley, who is serving
35 years for his role in the Mumbai attack, describes how he was "very
impressed with their dedication to the cause of the liberation of Kashmir from
Indian occupation."
Headley's memoir offers a unique window into his turn toward extremism, his
training with LeT and his preparations for an abortive attack on a Danish
newspaper for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, according to report
by ProPublica and Frontline.
In one passage, Headley, who frequently visited Pakistan, writes: "On one
of my trips, October 2000, I made my first contact with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT),
quite by accident. I attended their annual convection in November.
Marking his decision to join Lashkar "full time" following the 9/11
attacks, Headley says that by 2002 the group asked him to take "the Daura
Aamma, the basic military training course offered by LeT."
It was one of several training programmes he writes about, the report says
noting "by 2005, Lashkar's plans for Headley are coming into focus."
"He is trained in explosives, but perhaps most importantly, Lashkar asks
him to change the name given to him at birth by his Pakistani father and
American mother - Daood Gilani."
"He chooses David, which is English for Daood; Coleman, which was his
grandfather's name; and Headley, which was his mother's maiden name," the
report said.
It was a bureaucratic act, but intelligence officials cited by the report say
the change made Headley that much more difficult to track.
"Finally, in June, my immediate superior, Sajid Mir, instructed me to
return to the United States, change my Muslim name to a Christian sounding name
and get a new US passport under that name," he writes.
"He now informed me I would be going to India, since I looked nothing like
a Pakistani in appearance and spoke fluent Hindi and Urdu it would give me a
distinct advantage in India," Headley added.
Around the same time, Headley was conducting regular reconnaissance of targets
in Mumbai.
On one trip, he checked into the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which would later be
the epicentre of the Mumbai attack, with his new wife for a
"honeymoon."
The plan was to capture an Indian fishing vessel, which constantly strayed into
Pakistani waters, and commandeer it all the way to Mumbai.
"The hope was that the Indian Coast Guard would not notice an Indian
vessel. The boys would carry a GPS device which would guide them directly to
the landing site, I had selected earlier," he writes.
After the attack, Headley says he was told to "lay low." Instead, he
travelled to Denmark to scout the Jyllands-Posten newspaper for a possible
strike.
But western intelligence soon learn of the plot, and close in on Headley. He
was arrested on October 3 2009 at O'Hare Airport,Chicago on his way back to
Pakistan.