New delhi, January 16: A federal grand jury indictment unsealed in Chicago on Thursday has revealed that Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) bankrolled David Coleman Headley’s recce trips to Mumbai. According to the investigators, Headley was paid $28,000 for his repeated trips to India for surveillance of the terror targets.
In an indictment filed before the Chicago court, federal prosecutors said that the Lashkar operative, on the direction of his LeT handlers, changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, on February 15, 2006, in Philadelphia, enabling him to present himself in India as an American who was neither Muslim nor Pakistani.
Headley’s LeT handlers had showed him a Styrofoam mock-up of the Taj Mahal hotel and provided him with a global positioning system device and taught him how to use it to record the locations of possible landing sites and potential targets in Mumbai, which Headley then used during his surveillance trips in April and July 2008, the chargesheet has stated.
In the new document, Chicago businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana has been charged with helping Headley in the Mumbai terror attacks and being part of a conspiracy hatched in Pakistan to attack a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. It said Rana knew of the planned attacks in 2006, and that he allowed Headley to travel as a representative of his Chicago-based immigration business when the latter went overseas to scout locations for the attacks.
The grand jury also indicted Ilyas Kashmiri, a former Pakistani special forces commando and a terrorist leader in contact with Al Qaeda, as well as Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, a retired Major in the Pakistani military. Both are believed to be in Pakistan.
The two terror suspects had allegedly attended terror training camps in Pakistan between 2002 and 2003. According to the charges, unnamed Lashkar member A, who served as a ‘handler’ for Headley and another person associated with Lashkar, advised Headley in late 2005 that he would be travelling to India to perform surveillance of potential targets.
—Agencies