Lashkar - The War Against Terror Movie In Hindi Download 720p Hd
Violeta Torigian
He opened the office of an immigration consulting firm. He partied at swank locales such as the ornate Taj Mahal Hotel, a 1903 landmark favored by Westerners and the Indian elite. He joined an upscale gym, where he befriended a Bollywood actor. He roamed the booming, squalid city taking photos and shooting video.
But it was all a front. The tall, fast-talking Pakistani American with the slicked-back hair was a fierce extremist, a former drug dealer, a onetime Drug Enforcement Administration informant who became a double agent. He had spent three years refining his clandestine skills in the terrorist training camps of the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group. As Headley confessed in a guilty plea in U.S. federal court this year, he was in Mumbai to begin undercover reconnaissance for a sophisticated attack that would take two years to plan.
As Mir and Headley plotted in 2006, French investigators were confronting the potential dimensions of the threat posed by Lashkar, a longtime al-Qaeda ally founded in the late 1980s and used by Pakistan as a proxy army in the fight against India for the Kashmir region.
The evidence also convinced Bruguiere that Mir was an officer in the Pakistani army or the ISI, a branch of the military. This point is murky: Senior European and U.S. counterterrorism officials concur with the French judge, but some U.S. investigators do not think Mir was in the military. Pakistani officials say they have no information on Mir or Maj. Iqbal and deny any role of the security forces in terrorism.
A Paris court convicted Mir in absentia and sentenced him to 10 years in prison in 2007. Nonetheless, Bruguiere says most Western investigators he dealt with continued to view Lashkar as a regional actor confined to South Asia.
Before and after each trip, he met with Mir and Maj. Iqbal in Pakistani safe houses, turning over photos, videos and notes, according to investigators and U.S. court documents. At one point, Mir showed Headley a plastic-foam model of the Taj that had been built using the information Headley had gathered, according to investigators and documents.
That same month, U.S. agencies alerted India that intelligence suggested Lashkar was planning to attack the Taj and other sites frequented by foreigners and Americans, according to U.S. and Indian anti-terrorism officials.
The group also considered hitting the U.S. Consulate in Mumbai. Indian and U.S. investigators say another accused Lashkar scout had a map identifying the consulate along with other targets that were ultimately attacked.
The plan called for a team of fighters to infiltrate Mumbai by boat. Fifteen candidates were sent to Karachi for swimming and nautical instruction. But the youthful country boys had little experience with water. Some got seasick. Some ran away from swim training. Trainers had to bring in eight replacements, Indian and U.S. anti-terrorism officials say.
In July, Headley began his final scouting trip. In September, the anti-terrorism chief of the Mumbai police visited the Taj hotel to discuss new U.S. warnings. Hotel management beefed up security, Indian officials say.
The plotters isolated the 10-man attack team in a safe house in Karachi in mid-September and outlined their mission, using videos, photos and maps. In November Headley also headed for Karachi, where he met again with Mir but had no contact with the attack team, according to documents and officials.
On Nov. 18, eight days before the attacks, American officials told Indian intelligence that a suspicious ship might be en route to Mumbai. The Indians requested more information, the Indian anti-terrorism official said.
The gunmen hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, killed the crew and sailed to about five miles off the shores of Mumbai. On the evening of Nov. 26, the squad transferred to an 11-seat dinghy and landed in a slum where lights, phones and police were scarce.
Lashkar had set up a remote command post in a safe house or a hotel that U.S. and Indian officials believe was in Lahore or Karachi. The room was stocked with computers, televisions, voice-over-Internet phones from a New Jersey company and satellite phones that were manned by Mir and five other handlers, according to U.S. and Indian officials and a report prepared by Indian intelligence.
The assault began about 9:30 p.m. Two-man teams hit four of the targets within a half-hour. Assault rifles chattered; time bombs exploded in taxis; panic engulfed the city. Despite the U.S. warnings, Indian security forces were caught off-guard. Elite National Security Guard commandos did not fly in from Delhi until the next morning, according to the Indian intelligence report.
Using the alias Wassi, Mir oversaw the assault on the Taj hotel, the prime target, where 32 people died. The phone hand lers in Pakistan made the attack interactive, relaying reports about television coverage to the gunmen and even searching the Internet for the name of a banker they had taken hostage. After killing 10 people at the historic Leopold Cafe, a second assault team joined the two gunmen at the Taj.
The gunmen killed 33 people at the Oberoi, then took refuge in Room 1856. Their handlers instructed them to divide ammunition magazines and keep their weapons on burst mode to conserve bullets. After one gunman was killed, Mir encouraged the other to go out in a blaze of glory.
Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the red-bearded, 29-year-old director, and his pregnant wife, Rivka, 28, had entertained visitors in the second-floor dining room that night. Two rabbis from New York, Aryeh Leibish Teitelbaum and Ben-Zion Chroman, had stopped in to say goodbye as they wrapped up a trip to India to certify kosher food products.
News that one of his men had been captured reached Mir in the command post. Mir decided to try to win his release by using the two female hostages who were still alive at Chabad House: Yocheved Orpaz, an Israeli grandmother, and Norma Rabinovich, a Mexican tourist.
The next morning, helicopter-borne commandos swooped onto the roof. Mir gave real-time orders as he watched the gunfight on television. Akasha reported in a hoarse, strangled voice that he had been wounded in the arm and leg.
In December, Mir met Headley again, even though the other handler, Maj. Iqbal, had cut off contact with the American. Headley suggested narrowing the scope of the newspaper plot and killing only the cartoonist and an editor. Mir disagreed. Despite the uproar over Mumbai, he seemed eager to take an audacious terrorism campaign into Europe, according to documents and investigators.
About the same time, the FBI was pursuing yet another tip about Headley. A friend of his mother in Philadelphia had come forward after seeing the news about the Mumbai attacks. She told agents that she believed Headley had been fighting alongside Pakistani militants for years. Agents conducted an inquiry but then put it on hold because they thought he was out of the country, U.S. officials said.
In March, Mir sent Headley to India to scout more targets. But Headley was fixated on Denmark. For help, he turned to IIyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaeda boss. Kashmiri offered to provide Headley with militants in Europe for the attack. He envisioned attackers decapitating hostages and throwing heads out of the newspaper office windows, documents say.
The question of Pakistani government involvement drives a high-stakes debate. Some Western anti-terrorism officials think that, at most, Pakistani officials provided limited state support for the Mumbai attacks. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official believes a few mid-level Pakistani officials had an inkling of the plot but that its dimensions surprised them. Others speculate that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari may even have been a secondary target because of his overtures to India and his opposition to extremism.
Mir and Maj. Iqbal are keys to the mystery because they allegedly connect Lashkar and the government. Western and Indian investigators suspect that Mir is a former military or ISI officer, or at least had close links to the security forces. They believe that Maj. Iqbal was an ISI officer using a code name. A recent Interpol notice of an Indian arrest warrant gives only his rank and last name.
It remains to be seen whether Mir, Maj. Iqbal and other suspected plotters will be successfully prosecuted. An Indian court convicted the lone surviving gunman in June. But U.S. officials say the Pakistani trial of the Lashkar military chief and six lower-level suspects captured last year seems hopelessly stalled.
Critics call the crackdown largely symbolic, however. Lashkar camps, a longtime magnet for Western extremists attracted by slick English-language propaganda, still train aspiring fighters, a senior U.S. counterterrorism official said last week. And Pakistani leaders seem reluctant to confront the group and risk backlash from its trained fighters and the vast support base it has built through its charities and social programs.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Attorney General John Ashcroft, Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray of the Criminal Division, and U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty of the Eastern District of Virginia announced that Randall Todd Royer and Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Hamdi were sentenced today by U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema for their convictions on charges stemming from their participation in a network of militant jihadists centered in Northern Virginia.
Royer, 31, pled guilty in January 2004 to a two-count criminal information charging him with aiding and abetting the use and discharge of a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence, and with aiding and abetting the carrying of an explosive during the commission of a felony. In his plea agreement, Royer admitted to aiding and abetting co-defendants Masoud Khan, Yong Ki Kwon, Muhammed Aatique and Khwaja Mahmoud Hasan in gaining entry to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan operated by Lashkar-e-Taiba, where they trained in the use of various weapons. Royer also admitted to helping co-defendant Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Hamdi gain entry to the Lashkar-e-Taiba camp, where Al-Hamdi received training in the use of a rocket-propelled grenade in furtherance of a conspiracy to conduct military operations against India.
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