Though David Coleman Headley spent considerable time in India, scouting targets for the 26/11 attacks and visiting various cities, there is no credible evidence of him having accomplices in the country.
Sources say even the FBI team that visited India early this week did not give breakthrough information on Headley’s terror contacts here. Many in the security establishment are surprised that Headley does not seem to have accomplices in India other than casual acquaintances and people who worked with him at an immigration agency at Tardeo, Mumbai. None had any clue about Headley’s real mission.
But US investigators have been able to map out a detailed network of Headley in Pakistan, and establish his connection with Tahawwur Rana — who too is in American custody — in the US.
Indian sources are beginning to believe that while Headley may have done reconnaissance of 26/11 targets, he does not seem to have established local terror networks. Nor does he seem to have established contacts with local terror modules of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
“He may have taken up a freelance assignment of doing the recce,” says a senior official in the security establishment. “Probably he was far more important for the LeT for their operations in Europe.”
Many conversations between Headley and his Pakistani handlers, especially Major (retd) Abdul Rehman Hashim Syed, aka Pasha, show that Headley may have been crucial for LeT operations in Europe and probably also in the US. In Europe, the plan was to attack the headquarters of Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, which had published cartoons of Prophet Mohammad.
The FBI has provided detailed assessments of Headley’s contacts in Pakistan, and in turn that network’s contacts in Bangladesh. While Pasha has been taken into custody in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, security agencies may have been able to disrupt a plan to attack the US and Indian missions in Dhaka.
In Bangladesh, investigators have picked up Abdul Mutaliq, aka Muthu, a veteran of the Afghan mujahideen operations of the 1980s and who headed the LeT-Huji network in Bangladesh. Muthu came under the attention of US investigators after they picked up Headley’s trail, after they started probing Pasha’s regular contact with Headley.
