Mumbai: American terror suspect David
Headley was scheduled to visit India again in November last
year apparently to finalise the next target for Pakistan-based
Lashker-e-Toiba group and set up a base in Delhi.
Sources privy to the investigations said that 49-year-old
Headley had told his friends in India that he was coming to
the country in November for his business.
Headley`s messages to his friends, who have recorded
their statements before the National Investigation Agency,
stopped in the last week of September, barely a few days
before he was arrested by the FBI at O`Hare airport in Chicago
on October three last year, the sources said.
After recording the statements, the sleuths believe that
since Lashker had postponed its planned terror strike on
Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten because of international
pressure following 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, Headley, who was
arrested just before he could board a plane for Philadelphia
en route to Pakistan, was coming to India for finalising the
next target.
The friends, which included some women, told the
investigators that Headley was constantly in touch with them
from the US and before being arrested he had said that he was
coming to India and that they will have a get-together.
According to the documents shared by the FBI, Headley had
been asked by his handler, a Pakistani Army official, that he
should wind up his office -- First World Office -- in Mumbai
and "open up a new business centre in Delhi to be used as a
cover for future activities".
The travel details of Headley, who is now turning out to
be the globe-trotting prize asset of Lashker-e-Taiba, was
being examined by various agencies, the sources said.
The investigators believe that the last visit of Headley
to India in March last year may have been to finalise
synchronised terror strikes on Jewish houses located in five
cities.
Piecing together the travel trail of Headley during his
visit to India in March last year, the investigators were of
the opinion that the US terror suspect was scouting only the
Jewish targets including the El Al airlines office here.
Headley had carried out reconnaissance of the office of
Israeli airlines El AI located at Cuffe Parade in Mumbai in
March this year before moving to the national capital where he
chose to stay in a small hotel in Paharganj area.
The security agencies carried out the recce of the area
and found a Chabad House, barely 300 metres from the hotel --
De Holiday Inn.
From Delhi, Headley travelled to Pushkar in the outskirts
of Ajmer in Rajasthan where he insisted on a room opposite a
Jewish prayer centre claiming he was a Jew and wanted "holy
sight".
After staying there for three days, Headley moved to Goa
where he stayed at a guest house located in Anjuna village
along the coast of Arabian sea before proceeding towards Pune
where he scouted the area around Koregaon Park.
Headley, who was born to a Pakistani father and whose
earlier name was Daood Gilani, has been charged by the FBI
with conspiring in the audacious Mumbai attack of last year
which left over 160 people, including six foreigners, dead.
On the Indian side, the National Investigating Agency
(NIA), which was formed in the aftermath of 26/11, was probing
the role of Headley and his Pakistani-Canadian accomplice
Tahawwur Rana.
PTI
