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| Pakistan's Other Terror Ties |
| 2011-05-10 |
| It’s bad enough that Islamabad is suspected of aiding bin Laden. Now comes trial testimony that will suggest that the ISI helped plan the Mumbai attacks. America’s relationship with Pakistan, now revealed as the final home of Osama bin Laden, is about to be pushed even closer to the breaking point. A terrorism trial set to open next week in Chicago is expected to feature testimony from a confessed Pakistani-American terrorist who will link the central Pakistani spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, to the planning of the 2008 terrorist siege of Mumbai, India’s largest city, in which 170 people were killed, including six Americans. Lawyers and law-enforcement officials involved in the case tell The Daily Beast that trial testimony will suggest that the ISI has sheltered terrorist leaders on Pakistani soil—possibility including bin Laden, who hid out down the road from the homes of senior ISI officers in the city of Abbottabad, home to Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point. What’s more, the trial will surface claims that Pakistani government spies actively trained, equipped and funded terrorists who target American citizens abroad. The confessed Pakistani-American terrorist is David Headley, a 50-year-old Chicago man whose mother was American and who changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006 in what he now admits was an effort to avoid suspicion as he traveled. Headley is scheduled to testify as part of a plea bargain struck last year that spared him the death penalty and deportation to India, where he might also have faced execution |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #1 from BBC: The BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad says that although there have always been questions over the level of Pakistan's commitment to demobilise the Taliban and certain elements of al-Qaeda, the raid on 2 May is the first clear proof of the Americans giving up hope that the Pakistanis would really ever deliver. |
| Posted by: Water Modem 2011-05-10 09:26 |