Access To Headley Cleared, Govt Wants Pak Crackdown
Diwakar & Vishwa Mohan TNN
New Delhi: With the US promising access to David Headley, India is fast preparing a chargesheet against him, hoping to extract from him information on the Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders who masterminded the 26/11 attack and sensing an opportunity to disrupt the Karachi Project, which aims to launch attacks on India.
The instruction to draw up the chargesheet that would be the basis for sending a formal request to the US court—letter rogatory in legalese—for access to Headley was passed after a conversation home minister P Chidambaram had with Eric Holder, US attorney general and head of the Department of Justice.Holder said that provisions for India to access the terrorist, who on Thursday admitted to laying the groundwork for the 26/11 mass murder, has been clearly provided in Headley’s “plea agreement’’ with the US authorities.
The deal, under which he has been spared a certain death sentence in exchange for a guilty plea and cooperation with investigation agencies,stresses that Headley has agreed to “fully and truthfully testify in any foreign judicial proceedings held in the US by way of deposition, video conferencing or letter rogatory’’. A statement issued by Chidambaram also underlined that Headley’s calculation to escape lethal injection—the preferred way of execution in the American state of Illinois where he is being tried—will not be fulfilled until after he has cooperated with Indian agencies.
As the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which has already registered a case against the jihadi who scouted targets for Ajmal Amir Kasab and his gang, gets down to prepare the letter rogatory, authorities here are hoping to use the horde of information that Headley has to thwart the Karachi Project.
Headley aka Daood Gilani was the first to reveal the Karachi Project—an ISI plot involving retired and serving officers of the Pakistan army and aimed at launching terror attacks on India through Lashkar’s collaborators inside the country grouped under the banner of Indian Mujahideen.
The sinister plan was conceived by the ISI to pass off the attacks it designs and directs against India as cases of home-grown terror. A spate of terror attacks on Indian cities by Indian Mujahideen, mainly in 2008, was part of the Karachi Project. The gameplan, which suffered a setback because of the elimination of one of the ring leaders, Shahid Bilal, in gang war in Karachi and the arrests and killing of IM jihadis has been revived in a big way as Pakistan seeks to leverage its cruciality for Americans in Afghanistan to grab concessions from India.
The National Investigation Agency is hoping to use Headley’s information to thwart the Karachi Project, a plot scripted by the ISI and meant to launch terrorist attacks on India Home minister Chidambaram is told that provision for India to access the LeT terrorist is provided in his ‘plea agreement’ with the US authorities.... http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=Q0FQLzIwMTAvMDMvMjEjQXIwMDEwMQ==&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-custom
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