Bureaucrat Danyal accompanied his minister Syed Ali Zafar, who led the Pakistani delegation to India. He and David, conspirator of 26/11, have the same father.
New Delhi: Pakistani bureaucrat Danyal Gilani, half-brother of David Coleman Headley (alias Daood Gilani), one of the conspirators of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, was part of the Pakistani delegation that came to Delhi Friday to pay their last respects to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Gilani, in his mid-40s, has been a bureaucrat with Pakistan’s civil service for several years, and in his current position as director in the federal ministry of information & broadcasting, was accompanying outgoing I&B and law minister Syed Ali Zafar, who led the Pakistani delegation to Vajpayee’s cremation.
As hell breaks loose in Delhi over Gilani’s presence, the question that is being asked is: Didn’t High Commission officials in Islamabad, especially those dealing with intelligence, know that Danyal Gilani’s name was on the Pakistani list? And in that case, why did the Indian authorities give him a visa?
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Congress spokesperson Meem Afzal asked: “How did the government allow Headley’s brother to come into India? They have to answer.”
Didn’t meet Swaraj
Pakistani officials said Danyal Gilani accompanied his minister on their short trip to India, but did not meet external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj as the delegation was already too big.
The Pakistani delegation which met Swaraj consisted of High Commissioner Sohail Mehmood, minister Zafar, foreign office spokesperson & DG south Asia Mohammed Faisal, and his deputy.
How are they related?
Danyal Gilani and David Coleman Headley had the same father, Sayed Salim Gilani, a well-known broadcaster in Pakistan, who went on to retire as head of the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation.
Gilani senior is believed to have had a relationship with an American woman in his youth, and Daood/David was their child. But the father returned home to Pakistan, married again and had three children. Danyal Gilani is one of them.
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Danyal has been press secretary to former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, a former spokesman for Pakistan International Airlines, and is the current chairman of Pakistan’s Central Film Censor Board. He was recently responsible for banning the film Veere Di Wedding in Pakistan.
‘No connection with terror’
Headley, who had changed his name after the Lashkar-e-Taiba convinced him saying a foreign-sounding name would make it easier to enter and attack India, has previously said that his half-brother, the Pakistani bureaucrat, had no idea about his terrorist links, although his late father did.
Headley told a US court, in the investigation following the Mumbai attacks, that his father passed away in Pakistan a month after the attacks and that former Pakistani prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani had come to condole the death at his home.
Headley told a Mumbai court in 2016 he hated India because an Indian bomb had been dropped on his school in December 1971, and always wanted to take revenge.
Even at the time of Headley’s cross-examination, Danyal had remonstrated that he had no connection with the American terrorist, his half-brother.
Today, he is in the middle of a storm for exactly the same reason.
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