FBI was warned about key figure in Mumbai attacks

WASHINGTON: The wife of a key figure in the 2008 Mumbai attacks warned US federal agents three years beforehand that her husband was training with a Pakistani militant group, the Washington Post reported Friday.
Citing sources close to the case, the Post said the wife of David Coleman Headley warned FBI agents in August 2005 that her husband had undergone intensive training with Lashkar-e-Taiba and was in contact with extremists.
Headley is accused of having scouted locations for the coordinated attack, which terrorized the Indian city over the course of three days, leaving 166 people dead and over 300 others wounded.
Headley’s wife, who was not named in the report, called a terrorism hotline after getting into a fight with him in August 2005, the Post said.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents followed up, and interviewed her three times, the newspaper reported in a story co-authored with journalism foundation ProPublica.
She told agents that her husband “was an active militant in the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, had trained extensively in its Pakistani camps, and had shopped for night vision goggles,” the Post reported.
Despite the warning, Headley was able to continue moving freely, travelling to Pakistan, India, Dubai and Europe in 2006, gathering information and material that made the deadly attack possible.
US anti-terrorism agencies did warn Indian counterparts about a possible Lashkar plot to target Mumbai in 2008, but it was unclear whether the warnings were based on Headley’s wife’s tip-off two years earlier.
In a bizarre twist, Headley was reportedly also bragging about being a US government informant before the attacks, telling his wife and others that he working for the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI.
Headley did work as an informant for the DEA in the 1990s when he was known by his birth name Daood Gilani and had been arrested for smuggling heroin from Pakistan.
After a second arrest and more work for the agency, he went to Pakistan, where he became radicalized, the Post reported.
Then, after the September 11, 2001 attacks, he began telling people he was working for a joint DEA-FBI project.
But federal officials told the Post they did not believe Headley, who changed his name in 2006, had ever worked for the FBI.
Headley, the son of a former Pakistani diplomat and a white American woman, is being held in the United States.
He confessed to plotting the attacks and in exchange for pleading guilty, US prosecutors agreed he would not face extradition to India or the death penalty. –AFP