WASHINGTON, Nov. 8: American authorities sent David C. Headley, a Pakistani-American Las-hkar-e-Tayaaba (LeT) operative and suspect in the 26/11 attacks, to work for them in Pakistan months after the September 11, 2001, attacks, despite a warning that he sympathised with radical Islamic groups, according to court records and interviews.
Not long after Headley reached there, he began training with terrorists, eventually playing a key role in the 2008 attacks that left 164 people dead in Mumbai.
The October 2001 warning was dismissed, the authorities said, as the ire of a jilted girlfriend and for lack of proof. Less than a month later, those concerns did not come up when a federal court in New York granted Headley an early release from probation so that he could be sent to work for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in Pakistan. It is unclear what Headley was supposed to do in Pakistan for the Americans.
“All I knew was the DEA wanted him in Pakistan as fast as possible because they said they were close to making some big cases,” said Mr Luis Caso, Headley’s former probation officer.
On Sunday, while the US President, Mr Barack Obama, was visiting India, he briefed the Indian Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on the status of his administration’s investigation of Headley, including the failure to act on repeated warnings that he might be a terrorist. A senior US official said the inquiry has concluded that while the government received warnings, it did not have strong enough evidence at the time to act on them. “Had the United States government sufficiently established he was engaged in plotting a terrorist attack in India, the information would have most assuredly been transferred promptly to the Indian government,” the official said.