Does Tahawwur Rana have links with Pakistan? | Explained-OxBig News Network

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| Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI

The story so far: Sixteen years after David Coleman Headley (Daood Gilani) and Tahawwur Hussain Rana were arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) filed an FIR and a charge-sheet against them, Rana has been extradited to India. His extradition marks a major win for Indian investigators, lawyers and diplomats. Rana will now be in NIA custody and face trial in India. This will be the third in-person trial in India of terrorists, after Ajmal Kasab and Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, involved in November 26, 2008 terror attacks.

What is the evidence against Rana?

The case against Rana was laid out by U.S. investigators prosecuting him for the Mumbai attacks, planning the Copenhagen attack and for links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT); he was convicted in the last two cases in 2011. He had appealed against the extradition order to India, but the U.S. Supreme Court finally rejected it last week.

The evidence against him is based on three things: First, Rana’s actions in terms of funding and housing Headley, and helping him get Indian visas and tickets until 2009 as well as building a fake identity for him as a representative of Rana’s travel and immigration agency. In November 2008, days before the attacks, Rana and his wife travelled to Mumbai and other Indian cities. Second, Headley’s testimony, as part of the plea bargain against Rana, clearly states that Rana knew about the 26/11 conspiracy from 2006, and helped Headley carry out his reconnaissance operation willingly, and celebrated the attacks. Rana has denied this, and was eventually acquitted in the U.S. case. Third, are the FBI intercepts of Rana’s conversations with Headley, including one particular meeting Rana had with a “co-conspirator” in Dubai in September 2008, when he was told the attacks were imminent.

What is the Pakistan angle?

After Rana was extradited, Pakistan’s Foreign Office attempted to distance itself from him, holding that he had taken up Canadian citizenship in 1997, and hadn’t tried to renew his papers since. Rana was born in Pakistan’s Punjab province and attended a military school in Hasan Abdal, where he first met Headley. He joined the Pakistani army as a doctor and rose to the rank of colonel before he inexplicably left for Canada, claiming he had a medical condition. The Pakistani army declared him a deserter and Rana claimed Headley had told him he would use his connections to clear Rana’s records, which was why he agreed to help him. In his testimony, Headley says that Rana stayed in touch with LeT handlers throughout the planning of the operations. The question remains whether during the trial in India, Rana can point to a more direct link between Pakistan and the 26/11 conspiracy.

What about the trial in Pakistan?

After initially pursuing the evidence and promising India cooperation in the 26/11 case, Pakistan’s government has virtually dropped it, even as the trail led closer to LeT commanders including Hafiz Saeed, and possibly to LeT’s handlers in Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. However, between 2009 and 2013, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency managed to collect crucial evidence about the case, listed by then Director General Tariq Khosa in an article in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper. It proved Kasab had been trained in LeT camps in Thatta, Sindh, and the boat used by the terrorists was traced to a shop in Karachi where an LeT operative paid for it. More significantly, the operations room in Karachi from where LeT commanders gave direct orders to the terrorists was raided. The findings were shared with India for the Kasab trial. However, when India sought to match the voice recordings from the ops room to those in custody like Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Pakistan stopped cooperating.

Has the U.S. withheld anything from India?

Questions linger over how much U.S. authorities knew about the planning, given that they had shared a number of intelligence alerts about terror strikes on Mumbai hotels prior to November 2008. According to Indian officials, Headley was a “double agent”, an informant of the U.S. Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA), and carrying out an LeT plot, and that the intelligence came from him or through FBI intercepts. It is certainly curious that even though the FBI was tracking Headley’s calls and movement, they didn’t alert Indian authorities when he returned to India after the attacks in early 2009, to plan more attacks. He was arrested when he prepared to leave for Denmark in September 2009 to carry out attacks there.