David Coleman Headley alias Daood Gilani and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, the two US-based LeT operatives arrested in October by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, may have carried out a detailed recce of Mumbai, selected the potential targets, and created detailed visuals of those places for training the 10 terrorists who carried out the 26/11 strike, according to investigators.
What now has investigators really hooked is the possibility of the two having created sleeper cells in Mumbai, which may have provided the local support for the attacks.
Investigators believe that the duo may have been the reconnaissance team of the LeT that prepared detailed videos and shot pictures of the purported targets for the 26/11 attack.
“If so, they fill a major gap in our investigation of the Mumbai attack,” said a senior officer involved in the probe. The details gathered by Headley and Rana may have been passed on to the trainers of the 10 terrorists through Syed Abdul Rehman of the LeT.
The various intercepts that Indian and American agencies have been collecting on the senior LeT man suggest that he was a key player in the attack. Evidence collected by these agencies shows that Syed Abdul Rehman has been getting LeT agents in Bangladesh and Nepal to carry out reconnaissance of targets in India on a regular basis.
By the end of September, the agencies had gathered sufficient information to suggest that Rehman’s Bangladesh contact Muthu, who looks after LeT-Huji operations in South India, had been asked to carry out a detailed recce of Delhi. Muthu is part of the network of Shahid Bilal, the Hyderabad-born terrorist who was behind major attacks in South India and who was killed mysteriously in Pakistan in 2007.
“We never really had Syed Abdul Rehman in our sights, but we are now beginning to understand his network,” a senior officer in Delhi said. He said Headley and Rana were part of Rehman’s network, which has the task of carrying out detailed recce of targets and providing visual and other information to the LeT’s training wing. According to the FBI, Headley has also been to Denmark.
“Selecting Nariman House as a target requires deep understanding of Mumbai,” a source in the security establishment said, adding that Headley may have posed as a Jew in Mumbai.
