Mumbai: In an explosive revelation, David Coleman Headley, convicted in the United States for his role in 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, on Thursday confirmed that Ishrat Jahan, killed in an encounter in Gujarat, was indeed a Lashkar-e-Toiba operative.
Here are five things you should know:
- Deposing before a Mumbai court via video link, Headley said Ishrat Jahan was a suicide bomber of Lashkar-e-Toiba.
- Headley revealed that the LeT had a women's wing headed by Abu Aiman Mazhar.
- Headley said that Mumbai terror attacks mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi had told me about a botched operation of Muzammil in India. “The operation was about to shoot police at some checkpoint. One woman of LeT named Ishrat Jahan was involved (in it),” Headley told the court.
- 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan Raza, a resident of Mumbra, Maharashtra, was killed in an encounter on June 15, 2004, along with three men Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Gulam Sheikh, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar by the Crime Branch of Ahmedabad Police.
- The Ahmedabad Police had claimed that Ishrat and her associates were LeT operatives who were in Gujarat as part of a terror plot to assassinate the then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. There had been a debate ever since on whether the encounter was fake.
