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According to U.S. investigations, Tahawwur Hussain Rana’s links to the 26/11 attacks go back to August 2005, when he and his old school-mate from the Hasan Abdal Cadet College in Pakistan’s Punjab province, David Coleman Headley (born Daood Syed Gilani) first discussed the plot. Headley had been chosen and trained by Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) chief Hafiz Saeed to conduct reconnaissance surveys in Mumbai and in other Indian cities for targets that would maximise the death of civiliansand make an impact on the world. Rana, a businessman with a Canadian passport who ran a travel and immigration consultancy and butchery in Chicago, was well-placed to provide Headley with support, a place to stay, and the ability to provide false travel documents for tickets and visas.
As children at the Hasan Abdal Cadet College, Rana and Headley had become close friends, said U.S. prosecutors, and although they separated in their teens when Headley’s American mother took him out of school and returned to the U.S., they stayed in touch. Rana joined the Pakistani Army, serving for several years before he reportedly developed a medical condition, and left under a cloud for Canada in 1997. In Ottawa, neighbours remember Rana and his family seldom mixed with the community, Canadian newspapers reported at the time of his arrest. In Chicago a few years later, Rana reunited with his former cadet-schoolmate, and the two met regularly, which the U.S. investigators showed with a series of wire-taps and phone records provided to the courts.
“Headley proposed using Rana’s immigration business as a front for Lashkar’s surveillance activities, with Headley posing as an “immigration consultant” for Rana in Mumbai. To sweeten the deal for Rana, Headley offered to help resolve Rana’s status as a deserter from the Pakistani Army,” said the facts recorded by the U.S. District Court of Appeals in California, while ordering his extradition to India.
Pawn or handler?
While Rana has consistently denied being anything but a pawn in Headley’s plans, some investigators have questioned whether Rana was in fact Headley’s “handler”, and had been sent to Canada early to serve the ISI’s objectives by building a ‘cover’.
Indian prosecutors who secured his conviction in absentia in 2011 argued that Rana’s involvement was intense — from helping Headley secure a five-year multiple entry visa to India to organising his tickets and stay in Mumbai and other cities, to liaising with a Pakistani known as “Major Iqbal” for instructions.
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In November 2008, just days before the attacks, Rana himself travelled to Mumbai with his wife, although he claimed he was there for business only.
A month later, fresh from their “success” in plotting and planning the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, which was carried out by 10 Pakistani terrorists of the LeT who killed 166, Rana reportedly listened as Headley described their next target. Headley had been assigned by the LeT to conduct a surveillance operation on the Jylland-Posten newspaper in Denmark. The plan was to build the blueprint, as they had for 26/11, for terrorists on a suicide mission to attack the newspaper that had published cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad. According to the account of the conversation, given by Headley in his “plea bargain” ( filed with the United States District Court Northern District Of Illinois Eastern Division in October 2009), the order for the mission came not from the Lashkar-e-Toiba or its handlers in the Pakistani military, but from the “elders”, and conveyed to him through Ilyas Kashmiri, a shadowy Pakistani terror-commander believed to work for ISI and al-Qaeda. The orders were chilling — that the suicide attackers would behead journalists in the newsroom and throw their heads on to the street below to “heighten the response from Danish authorities”. Far from being appalled, however, Rana got to work on helping Headley falsify details for travel documents, printing business cards for Headley as an “Immigration Consultant” working for him, and other details, to secure Headley a meeting inside the newspaper office, which Headley did, a few weeks later.The plea bargain filed after Headley was arrested in Chicago’s O Hare in October 2009 for “The Mickey Mouse” conspiracy (named after the cartoons) in Denmark, which exempted Headley from the death penalty or from being extradited, was a setback for Indian officials, as investigators had hoped to try the Mumbai 26/11 mastermind in India and glean details of his links to Pakistan’s ISI, al-Qaeda, LeT, Hafiz Saeed, and co-conspirators in India, Pakistan and the US. But more than that, it was a blow for Tahawwur Rana’s hopes that he could escape justice for his role in the attacks, by pleading that he was an innocent bystander on Headley’s work, and had, as his lawyers said been “misled” by his childhood friend. New Delhi was also angry that the U.S. who was surveilling Headley, a former agent of their Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA), closely by then, did not tell them when Headley returned to India in February 2009 for another LeT reconnaissance operation.
Although the U.S. courts acquitted Rana of charges on the Mumbai 26/11 attacks, they convicted him for involvement in the Jyllands-Posten case and his links with the LeT, sentencing him to 14 years imprisonment before he was released early in 2020. As Rana worked his way through levels of appeal after U.S. courts approved his extradition to India, and now awaits the last port of appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts, he has had much time to think about the twists of fate that mean that it is he, and not his friend and co-conspirator who then testified against him, who will have to answer for the Mumbai attacks, and face justice for both their actions.
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Published – March 09, 2025 01:19 am IST
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Tahawwur Hussain Rana: In the terror web
