limited hangout Mumbai edition

So here's another rabbit hole to fall into. You probably heard about this guy David Headley, arrested in Chicago for involvement in the Mumbai terrorist attacks as well as attacks on a Danish newspaper? Healey's real name is Daood Gilani. He was arrested in mid-October.

Who is this guy? Long story. Dramatic story.

For the record, my last post on Mumbai wondered why the terrorists' bodies lay unclaimed in the morgue for a year.

Mumbai/New Delhi: Almost a year after they were killed during the terrible assault on Mumbai last November, the bodies of the nine terrorists continue to remain in Mumbai’s J.J. Hospital morgue. There are no claimants and the authorities are clueless on what to do with them.

They continue to remain in a room sealed with round-the-clock security and where the temperature is set at four degrees Celsius to prevent any decomposition.

The 10 gunmen killed over 170 people in a series of coordinated attacks that began Nov 26 last year. Mohammed Ajmal Amir alias Kasab, currently undergoing trial, was the only one captured alive after the strikes that targeted two luxury hotels, the city’s main train station, a hospital and a Jewish centre.

So please, if you haven't read that, go right ahead because it's pertinent. Bottom line: we really don't know who committed the Mumbai terrorist attacks, but it was a big operation with a double cross involved, and plenty of gruesome torture -- not your typical killings but the sort of thing that gives forensic doctors accustomed to murder in big cities nightmares.

Like 911, the official Mumbai story has some glaring problems. For instance, the Mumbai attacks were supposedly carried out by just 10 gunmen. These 10 gunmen were able to hold several huge buildings and multiple hostages for a couple of days while simultaneously fighting off swarms of heavily armed Indian forces. It doesn't make sense, of course, but since there are only 10 people accounted for -- 9 in the morgue plus Kasab -- the narrative remains stuck on 10. If there were others, then how would they have gotten away, hmm? They couldn't, see, unless they were for some inconceivable reason *allowed* to get away, like the people who did 911. Pfft. But that can't happen, that would be a conspiracy, and conspiracies don't exist, so these mystery terrorists don't exist either. Simples.

But on the other hand, *somebody* must have helped these 10 guys land undetected. This is supposedly the "missing link" in the narrative. And so this is where Gilani comes in.

December 09, 2009 Edition 1

MUMBAI: Ever since his arrest in Chicago in October, India has been gripped by the case of David Headley, a Pakistani-American man who is alleged to have helped plan last year's deadly attacks on Mumbai.

The plot, according to the media in India, reads like a movie thriller: a well-built fitness fanatic and white Muslim convert befriends Bollywood stars, using an alias and visa business as cover as he scouts out possible targets. He then reports back in coded e-mails to shadowy Pakistani agents directing operations, preparing for the high-profile strike that will kill 166 people, including 25 foreigners, sending shockwaves around the world.

With Headley now facing charges in the US, Indian security analysts believe the FBI could have found the vital missing link to the November 26 attacks on Mumbai.

The question about whether the 10 gunmen had specialist help to land undetected by sea and strike their targets with such precision has been posed ever since the attacks.

Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute of Conflict Management, agreed, suggesting Headley assumed "a very significant role" in the attacks.

The US Department of Justice said Headley made five trips to Mumbai from September, 2006, to July, 2008, "each time taking pictures and making videotapes of various targets, including those attacked in November, 2008".

During those trips he reportedly befriended the gym instructor son of a Bollywood director, met a top actor and dated an actress and stayed in an expat enclave in south Mumbai, near the US consulate.

He is also said to have stayed at one of the targets, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower H0otel. Sahni said the charges against Headley, plus a Pakistan-born Canadian and a retired Pakistani army major, would put pressure on Pakistan. The charges against Headley could raise questions about the supposed role played by two Indians on trial in Mumbai. The two men are accused of also being key planners behind the attacks. - Sapa-AFP

So what else do we know about Gilani? He's from Philadelphia.

A former Philadelphia tavern operator-turned-terror suspect played a key role in planning last year's deadly assaults in Mumbai, India, according to new federal charges.

David Coleman Headley, 49, who was brought to Philadelphia from Pakistan as a teenager, spent nearly two years scouting locations that figured in the attacks on targets including the Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels, a cafe, and a Jewish center, federal authorities say.

...The Mumbai charges, filed yesterday in federal court in Chicago, added a chilling new dimension to the already strange saga of Headley - born Daood Gilani, the son of a prominent Pakistani broadcaster and a striking Main Line woman with a taste for adventure.

A U.S. citizen, Gilani attended Lashkar training camps beginning in February 2002. In 2006, after learning that the organization wanted him to perform surveillance in India, he changed his name to Headley in Philadelphia so he could travel more easily, authorities say.

Posing as a representative of an immigration-services business, Headley began traveling to Mumbai in September 2006, the charges say.

Actually it sounds like he was a bit of a fuck-up.

Headley was born in 1960 in Washington to Serrill Headley, who grew up in Bryn Mawr, and Syed Saleem Gilani. Headley married Gilani at age 19, according to an Inquirer story. After Gilani's job in Washington ended, the couple returned to Pakistan.

The couple divorced. Headley married and later divorced a second Pakistani - an executive - before returning to Philadelphia. After several attempts, she was able to get her son Daood out of Pakistan in the 1970s and later bought and renovated a pub at 56 S. Second St. that she called the Khyber Pass. She died last year.

The boy - described by family friends as sullen but handsome, with one blue eye and one brownish-green - had trouble adjusting to life in the States after his conservative upbringing in Pakistan, friends said.

Headley later took over the bar but drove it into bankruptcy. He also took accounting classes at the Community College of Philadelphia in the 1990s but did not earn a degree, and he managed video stores for a time in Philadelphia and New York. In 1998, he was sentenced to 15 months in jail in New York for smuggling heroin from Pakistan.

The current case has been huge news in India, with media chasing scraps of information about Gilani's comings and goings.

On Saturday, Danyal Gilani, a spokesman for the Pakistani prime minister, confirmed that Headley is his half-brother, but said he had little contact with him since 2002. He last saw him at his father's funeral in 2008, according to a report in the Times of India.

He said his family was not related to the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The prime minister did visit his house after his father's death last year to offer condolences, he said.

You know the funny thing about people who have connections, they get a little tone deaf to reality. Those of us *without* connections know very well that if you bankrupt a bar, don't have a degree, and get convicted for smuggling drugs from Pakistan, then you can not reasonably expect to get a good job. That's how life works for us mere mortals. But the connected have different rules. The least you can do is become an informer for the DEA, and then use that cover to plot terrorist attacks.

Headley, 49, who was born Daood Gilani, the son of a Pakistani father and an American socialite mother, agreed to become an informer for the Drug Enforcement Administration as part of a plea deal after his conviction in 1998 on heroin-smuggling charges.

Law-enforcement and diplomatic officials say they are barred from speaking publicly beyond the court record in the terrorism case against Mr. Headley, who is alleged by American officials to have adopted his Western name in 2005 to make it easier to travel on terrorist missions.

But they acknowledge privately there is the possibility that Headley traveled to Pakistan on behalf of the DEA, which is part of the Justice Department, and used the trips instead as an opportunity to meet with leaders of the Pakistan terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba and plot attacks on Indian and Western targets.

You can also hook up with a couple of guys running a visa company, and use that as cover to bring suspicious people into the US. It helps keep the war on terror going.

The Justice Department has also not disclosed much of what it knows about the two immigration companies linked to Headley and a Pakistani-born Canadian, Tahawwur Rana, who is also under arrest in the United States and charged with terrorism.

News reports in the U.S. and India have identified the two men as owners or managers of First World Immigration, which had offices in Chicago, and the Immigrant Law Center, a much smaller company based out of a large air-conditioned market in south Mumbai. Both firms advertised their ability to help skilled and unskilled Indian immigrants obtain visas to enter the U.S.

Federal authorities say they believe that Headley used his connections to the companies as a cover for terrorist surveillance ahead of last year’s attacks in Mumbai, as well as surveillance of the offices of a newspaper in Copenhagen, Denmark, that was condemned by Muslim groups around the world after it published cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammed.

Headley’s affiliation with the visa companies raises an even more troubling concern for American law-enforcement officials, because there is the fear the firms may also have been used to obtain visas for extremists to enter the United States and Canada.

News reports in India this month said that at least one of the companies’ former Indian clients has already been deported from the United States after immigration officials here determined that he had false documents.

...The immigration companies put advertisements in Indian newspapers last November, only days before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, promoting the firms’ ability to help ex-military officers obtain jobs in the United States and Canada.

Allright??!!! If you really feel adventurous, read this to see connections to Mulla Omar, Benazir Bhutto, etc. All this is totally normal see? He could have been your mailman, no?

Either Kafka is playing a joke on Gilani, or he is an intelligence operative being hung out to dry. I vote for B. And by the way, the correspondent for Dalit Voice has the following to say (scroll down):

26/11 Bombay attack was planned to kill Karkare

OUR CORRESPONDENT

Bangalore: S.M. Mushrif, a retired IG of police of Maharashtra, in his sensational just released book, Who killed Karkare? directly accuses the Brahminists in the Govt. of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), (virtually taken over by the Brahminical terrorist force, RSS), for bungling in the 26/11/2008 Bombay terrorist attack. In the country’s most famous terrorist attack on Bombay, he says the incident has to be divided into two parts. The CST-Cama Hospital-Rangabhavan Lane episode of the attack is mysterious because Maharashtra’s most famous ATS chief, Hemant Karkare, noted for bravery, impartiality and efficiency, was shot dead here at the instance of IB to save the notorious Brahminists involved in the Malegaon bombing.

Malegaon terrorists released

All the Malegaon accused who were arrested by Karkare are about to be released and will come out as heroes — thanks to the IB complicity, he says.

The two Pakistani terrorists, Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan, arrested in the CST-Cama Hospital episode are not foreigners but fluent Marathi-speakers, he says giving eye-witness reports in Bombay newspaper. Karkare was led to the trap laid by the IB.

In other words, the 26/11 terrorist attack was used by the IB to solely kill Karkare.

The 320-page book tears into pieces the country’s premier intelligence network IB, and says the IB is more interested in the micro-minority Brahminists but not in the 130-crore Indians and their security.

Object is to eliminate Karkare

The CST-Cama Hospital “terrorists” were not part of the terrorists from Pakistan but were local ones.

American warning suppressed

The operation was planned, directed and executed by the Brahminists under the IB with the sole objective of eliminating Karkare who had unearthed many Brahminist terrorist plots to establish Hindu Rashtra.

CST-Cama hospital part had nothing to do with the Taj-Oberoi-Nariman House attack. The Brahminical media cooperated with the IB.

Another sensational disclosure is the IB had received the warning of the terrorist attack on Bombay from the US but it deliberately suppressed the warning as it wanted to club the murder of Karkare along with the 26/11 so that the blame for the murder would go to Pakistani terrorists.

The author reveals that even top BJP leaders like L.K. Advani and Narendra Modi were not aware of the Brahminist conspiracy. This shows the Brahminists have no confidence in these two non-Brahmin leaders and even the Shiv Sena whose chief Bal Thackeray was called “a danger to Hindu community”.

Abhinav Bharat becomes hero

As soon as Karkare was got rid of by the Brahminists in IB, it managed to quickly appoint a top Brahmin, K.P. Raghuvanshi, IPS, to succeed him. The new ATS chief completely changed all the records and painted the Abhinav Bharat Brahminical terrorists involved in many murder cases, in glowing colours. Soon all the Malegaon accused in jail were released. They are now free to pursue their Hindu Rashtra-building mission.

Lt. Col. Purohit, heading the Malegaon bombing and other murders, is being hailed as a great patriot who sacrificed his life to protect India from Pakistan’s terrorists. Abhinav Bharat, a super RSS outfit with close connection to zionist Israel, has already resumed its “patriotic activities” with the support of the IB to rebuild the Brahminist Rashtra.The book is a fantastic documentary proof that defends all that we have so far said in Dalit Voice on this 2% micro-minority terrorist forces holding the country to ransom.

DV congratulates the author Mushrif, for his painstaking study, his bravery in exposing the IB — that too being a Muslim.

DV has proved right in all its report on the 26/11.

************************

“National” media gagged

OUR CORRESPONDENT

Bangalore: Representatives of all the national print and electronic media descended on the house of S.M. Mushriff, retd. IG of police Maharashtra, at Pune on Oct.28 as soon as they heard about the release of his sensational book, Who Killed Karkare? They spent almost the whole day interviewing him.

But nothing came out either on the TV or the “national” toilet papers the next day — because there was a gag order from their bosses. What transpired is not known but media sources in Pune and Bombay said the Intelligence Bureau threatened them in the name of “national security” — once again confirming our charge that the entire Indian media and our government machinery are controlled by the mere 2% Brahminical rulers.

It is these people who always harp on “freedom of press”. What they mean by this is they need the “freedom” to vilify if not eliminate the Bahujan forces fighting for human rights.

************************

WHO KILLED KARKARE?

(The real face of terrorism in India)

S.M. Mushrif, former IG, Police, Maharashtra

For the first time, it probes deep into the “Islamic terrorism” in India. Of particular interest is the book’s detailed study of the 26/11 attack on Bombay during which Maharashtra ATS cheif Hemant Karkare was killed.

2009 pp.320 Rs. 300 (US$25)

Pharos Media Ltd.,
D-84, Abul Fazal Enclave-I, Jamia Nagar, New Delhi - 110 025

Email: info@pharosmedia.com

Same shit, different country.

UPDATE: Lots more about Gilani at aangirfan.