Terror suspect says Pakistan's intelligence service involved in planning Mumbai attacks

21 October 2010

Twenty-one people were involved in plotting the terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008, including four serving officers of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and three former officers of the Pakistani Army, the suspected terrorist David Headley has reportedly told Indian investigators in June 2010. Headley, who was born Daood Sayed Gilani to a Pakistani-American father and an American mother but later changed his name to David Coleman Headley to avoid racial profiling in the US and to make travel to India easier. He was arrested in October 2009 at Chicago Airport on suspicion of being a member of the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which carried out the attacks in Mumbai on 26 November 2008.

Lashkar-e-Taiba was formed in the early 1990s to send Islamist militants across the de-facto border which separates Indian from Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. The British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ quotes Headley as saying that since 2005, splinter groups had been breaking away from the group. These dissidents were close to radical groups such as al-Qaida or those that were to become the Pakistani Taliban. Senior commanders "had a serious problem holding the LeT [together] and convincing them to [only] fight for Kashmir and against India," Headley told his interrogators, according to the newspaper. The ISI, he told his interrogators, was equally concerned and under "tremendous pressure to stop the integration of Kashmir-based outfits with Jihadi-based outfits" and hoped "to shift … the theatre of violence from the domestic soil of Pakistan to India".

The ISI denied any involvement in the Mumbai attacks, in which 173 people died and over 300 were wounded. One of the targets was the Chabad Jewish center in Mumbai, Nariman House (pictured above). In May 2010, an Indian court sentenced Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving LeT gunman, to death.

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