Four weeks after 26/11, the quiet immigration consultant who had worked backstage to engineer the carnage was pushing for more killing. “He’s doing zehan saazi to me,” Lashkar-e-Taiba intelligence operative David Coleman Headley chuckled, as he spoke to a jihad commander in Pakistan, using an Urdu term for incitement. “You should act like this,” Headley reported Tahawwur Rana had told him, “and if that happens you should do that, and fear nothing except God.” Tahawwur had a long list of targets — film stars, politicians, pilgrims to the Somnath Temple.
Eleven years after he was convicted by a Chicago court for providing assistance to the Lashkar-e-Taiba—but cleared of a direct role in facilitating the 26/11 attacks—Tahawwur finally faces extradition to India. The trial could deliver punishment for a perpetrator—but will also illustrate how tenuous justice has been for the victims.
Although Headley admitted direct responsibility for killing 166 people, he received just 35 years in prison, in return for cooperating with the American investigators. The Lashkar commanders Headley named, though, remain out of reach, in Pakistan. The trial of Zabiuddin Ansari, the single Indian national involved, remains ongoing thirteen years after his arrest.
“They’re using a whale to catch a minnow,” Tahawwur’s lawyer, Charles Swift, had complained during his trial in Chicago. The twisted story of Tahawwur’s relationship with Headley, and the Lashkar leadership, helps one understand how the whales ended up escaping.
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The Lashkar’s doctor
Even though they became close friends at the Hasan Abdal cadet college—a boarding school with old-fashioned military values, founded under military ruler General Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1952—Tahawwur and Headley came from different worlds. The son of the urbane Gurdaspur-born poet and broadcaster Saleem Gillani and the brilliant but unstable Philadelphia socialite Alice Sherrill Headley, Headley shared the Westernised lifestyle of Lahore’s élite. Tahawwur, a distant relative, came from an affluent but conservative landed family.
The two men often described each other as brothers—until 2009, that is, when they faced off in the 26/11 trial, with Tahawwur accusing Headley of repeatedly betraying friends to evade responsibility for his crimes.
Following the 1977 coup in which General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq took power, Sherrill took Headley back to America. The troubled teenager turned to drugs and alcohol, twice ending up in prison on narcotics charges. The second time, he agreed to work as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency against Pakistani heroin traffickers, in return for a reduced prison sentence.
As Headley struggled through life, Tahawwur earned a medical degree and began serving as a captain in the Pakistan Army medical corps. He married fellow-doctor Samraz Rana, and the couple had a daughter, Zoya. Following a tour of duty on the Siachen glacier in 1997, when Tahawwur developed pulmonary oedema, he fled the country, later securing citizenship of Canada. Facing trial for desertion, though, Tahawwur could never return to his homeland.
Following 9/11, under circumstances which have never been fully explained—leading many to suspect he was conducting intelligence work for the United States—Headley decided to return to Pakistan. Legal documents filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigations state he joined the Lashkar-e-Taiba, serving under military commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and his deputy, Muzammil Butt.
Lakhvi is serving a prison sentence in Pakistan on terror financing charges but has never faced a trial for 26/11. The operational commander of the 26/11 attacks, Sajid Mir, was secretly convicted by an anti-terrorism court in Lahore last summer, but neither the charges nor sentence have been made public. For his part, Muzammil—who trained the 26/11 killing team—remains a fugitive.
Former Pakistan army officer Major Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed—known to the 26/11 plotters as ‘Pasha’—has also evaded justice, together with the serving Inter-Services Intelligence officer who trained Headley in tradecraft, so far identified only as Major Iqbal.
There’s one depressing failure of justice closer home, too. The only Indian national who participated in the 26/11 attacks, Syed Zabiduddin Ansari, was handed over to India in 2012 by Saudi Arabia, but his trial is yet to be completed.
“The army should be withdrawn from Kashmir, and Kashmiris given their rights,” former Students Islamic Movement of India activist Ansari had said on 26/11, speaking over an encrypted phone line from the Lashkar’s control room in Karachi. “The land on which the Babri Masjid stood should be handed over to Muslims, and the mosque should be rebuilt.”
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Tahawwur and 26/11
Even though Tahawwur’s family has protested his innocence—even claiming the doctor is an ideologically-committed pacifist —FBI investigators discovered he was deeply enmeshed with the plot. Lashkar commanders Sajid Mir and Muzammil, the FBI alleged, suggested Headley use Tahawwur’s business, First World Immigration, to serve as a cover for his operations in Mumbai. Tahawwur, who knew of Headley’s training with the Lashkar and his relationship with Major Iqbal, agreed without reservation, the FBI said.
Following his fourth visit to Mumbai, in the summer of 2008, the FBI alleged Headley briefed Tahawwur about the surveillance he had conducted on targets in Mumbai, including the Taj hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji train terminus. Tahawwur was also told about Headley’s work to select a landing site for the attackers.
Among other things, the FBI said, Major Iqbal had emailed Tahawwur to help facilitate the setting up of a new First World Immigration office in New Delhi, to help Headley surveil targets.
From the available evidence, it is clear Tahawwur approved of what happened in Mumbai. Tahawwur, Headley claimed, later told him “the Indians deserved it.” In the course of a September 2009 car ride—covertly recorded by the FBI—Tahawwur told Headley the nine attackers who died should be given the Nishan-e-Haider, Pakistan’s highest military award.
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Evidence of guilt
Tahawwur accepted, in the course of his trial, that he had helped Major Iqbal set up a front business for Headley—but claimed he believed he was helping the Inter-Service Intelligence conduct espionage, not an act of terrorism. Although helping Pakistani intelligence would have been a crime had Rana been tried in India, his activities were not illegal in the United States, since they were not directed against the country.
Following 26/11, e-mail and intercepted conversation revealed Rana became increasingly enmeshed in a plot to bomb the Jyllands Posten—a Copenhagen newspaper which had incensed many Muslims by publishing cartoons many believed were blasphemous. Testimony from Headley, moreover, did not show Rana had ever been consulted on decisions to do with the actual planning of 26/11.
Tahawwur was finally convicted of providing material support to a terrorist group, but not on 26/11 charges.
Evidence produced by Tahawwur, the jury believed, called into question Headley’s claims his old friend had direct knowledge of the attacks. For example. Tahawwur visited Mumbai with his wife and daughter in November 2008— an odd decision, his defence lawyers pointed out, for a man alleged to have knowledge an attack was imminent. The family travelled using their real names and even visited relatives in Hapur and Meerut.
For their part, prosecutors argue there is evidence reason to question Tahawwur’s protestations of innocence. Headley’s secretary, Mahrukh Bharuch, told the National Investigation Agency that she had been told the office was going to be closed down in July 2008. The deadline was extended to November 15, 2008, though—allowing Tahawwur to complete his visit just before 26/11.
The extradition of Tahawwur will at most represent a meagre kind of compensation. The real story of 26/11 remains how terrorists—and a national state which backed them—got away with mass killing.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)