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Consulate goofed up in giving Rana visa: Probe
S Rajagopalan/PNS | Washington/New Delhi
‘Indian mission in US committed major security lapse’
Even as reports indicated that the notorious Pakistani spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), could be linked to terror suspect David Coleman Headley, an official inquiry in New Delhi has exposed how the Indian Consulate in Chicago blundered in issuing multiple-entry visas to Pakistani-turned-Canadian Tahawwur Hussain Rana.
Headley and Rana are alleged to have plotted terror strikes in India. The Indian Consulate committed a major security lapse in issuing visas to the Canadian. While the Consulate claimed it had done “due scrutiny” before issuing visas to Rana and his wife, the inquiry revealed that the residential address provided in the visa applications by the couple did not exist.
Moreover, an immigration services’ company where Rana claimed to have been employed informed the Indian authorities that he was never with them nor did they have a branch in Mumbai as stated by him, official sources said on Sunday.
The 48-year-old Pakistan-born businessman was issued a multi-entry visa for a period of one-year and his spouse Samraz Rana Akhtar was given a five-year multiple-entry visa by the Consulate last year, enabling them to visit Mumbai and several other places in India days before the 26/11 Mumbai terror strikes. The visas were issued at the discretion of Indian Consulate General.
The visas by the Consulate were issued “under the discretion of the Consul General,” which the Union Home Ministry said was in violation of a 2004 circular under which prior clearance was required for issuing visas to any Pakistan-born person. While Rana was born in Chichawatni his wife was born in Bahawalpur in Pakistan. The two were exempted even from registering with the police if their stay did not exceed 180 days.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on Sunday that David Coleman Headley had vowed to “retaliate against India” in one of his e-mail messages intercepted by US investigators. “We will retaliate against India,” Headley wrote in the message.
In regular e-mail exchanges with classmates from the military high school in Pakistan that he attended before moving to the US with his mother in 1977, Headley was found to have often engaged in impassioned debates about politics and Islam.
Citing friends of the Headley family, the Times report from Philadelphia identified Headley’s father as former Pakistani diplomat Sayed Salim Gilani, who was posted in Washington in the late 1950s.
It profiles Headley’s rise as an Islamic fundamentalist. Moving back to the US at the age of 16, the Washington-born Headley felt “pulled between two cultures and ultimately gravitated toward an extremist Islamic one”.
In his e-mail messages, he has sought to defend beheadings and suicide bomb attacks as “heroic”. “Some of us are saying that ‘terrorism’ is the weapon of the cowardly,”
Headley wrote in an e-mail message to his high school classmates last February. “I will say that you may call it barbaric or immoral or cruel, but never cowardly.”
In that mail, Headley goes on to say, “Courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim nation.”
It has also emerged that Headley, who was convicted in 1998 of conspiring to smuggle heroin into the US from Pakistan, provided so much information about drug trafficking that he was sentenced to less than two years in jail and then sent to Pakistan to conduct undercover surveillance operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
It has also come to light that Headley, besides having a traditional Pakistani wife living with their children in Chicago, also has an American girlfriend, said to be a makeup artist in New York.
“Depending on the setting, he alternates between the name he adopted in the United States, David Headley, and the Urdu one he was given at birth, Daood Gilani. Even his eyes — one brown, the other green — hint at roots in two places,” the Times said. In 1977, his mother Serrill Headley won parental custody and took him to her hometown Philadelphia after a protracted court battle following her broken marriage with the diplomat.
The report, citing family friends, describes Headley’s father as “a dashing diplomat and an avid musicologist and poet, (who) charmed his way into the heart of Serrill Headley, who had left Philadelphia’s Main Line to work as a secretary at the embassy”.
According to the report, the couple along with their infant son, Daood, had back in 1960 left Washington for Lahore, but their marriage quickly soured as Serrill refused to submit to the Pakistani traditions.
Meanwhile, a PTI report from Geneva said the US investigators believed some elements in Pakistan’s ISI could be linked to Headley who is currently in the FBI custody for trying to plot attacks on India.
The investigators made this assessment on the basis of the arrest of “two key persons” in Pakistan, sources said. Illyas Kashmiri, a former Pakistani military officer who has become a militant commander associated with both Al-Qaeda and LeT, is one among them.
They have also zeroed in on a Pakistani national who is suspected to be a key link between LeT handlers and the two, the agency report said, quoting sources.
A Pakistani national believed to be a common link between the LeT handlers like Zaki-ur Lakhvi and the two terror suspects detained by the FBI has been identified. The national, whose identity has been kept secret, is believed to have been in Pakistan at the time of Mumbai carnage.
Sources said India would know in a week’s time from the US whether Headley and Rana, who are operatives of LeT, were involved in Mumbai attacks. Security agencies in India suspect the duo could have been involved in 26/11 attacks.
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