26/11 Attacks: The Great Headley Chase

The 26/11 scout and planner nails the role of his LeT associates and Pakistan’s ISI.

- Sandeep Unnithan

David Coleman Headley returned to Mumbai nearly seven years after he boarded a flight to Chicago, never to return. Only this time he came back as a video signal beamed from halfway across the globe into a packed sessions courtroom in a city where he had helped plan the slaughter of 166 persons during the terror attacks of November 26, 2008.

Flanked by three US officials, the grey sweatshirt-clad 55-year-old calmly unravelled the 26/11 conspiracy before the court for a week, beginning February 8. The Indian government’s attempts to extradite Headley had come to an end when he was given a 35-year sentence for terrorist acts by a US court in 2013.

The video link, a result of his turning approver last December in the ongoing trial of 26/11 plotter Abu Jundal, was the closest India’s legal system could get to him. Headley went to work, like a needle knitting together all the missing threads of the 26/11 plot. He had soon woven a patchwork quilt of serving military personnel and hard-core terrorists, linked together by the bizarre compulsions of Pakistan’s deep state in waging unending war against India. Some of the names he revealed in the deposition—Major Iqbal, his ‘handler’ within the ISI, and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi’s handler Brigadier Riyaz—had found mention earlier, during the week-long interrogation by police officials from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Chicago in 2010. But these statements had never been in a sworn deposition and in an open court, the reason why special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam is confident the statements will give a boost to the 26/11 case and allow the police to undertake further investigations.