Terrorists David Headley & Rana Had Privileged Upbringing
nkdat...@bigmailbox.net
New York
November 22, 2009
A Terror Suspect With Feet in East and West
By GINGER THOMPSON
PHILADELPHIA — The trip from a strict Pakistani boarding school to a
bohemian bar in Philadelphia has defined David Headley’s life,
according to those who know the middle-age man at the center of a
global terrorism investigation.
Raised by his father in Pakistan as a devout Muslim, Mr. Headley
arrived back here at 17 to live with his American mother, a former
socialite who ran a bar called the Khyber Pass.
Today, Mr. Headley is an Islamic fundamentalist who once liked to get
high. He has a traditional Pakistani wife, who lives with their
children in Chicago, but also an American girlfriend — a makeup artist
in New York — according to a relative and friends. Depending on the
setting, he alternates between the name he adopted in the United
States, David Headley, and the Urdu one he was given at birth, Daood
Gilani. Even his eyes — one brown, the other green — hint at roots in
two places.
Mr. Headley, an American citizen, is accused of being the lead
operative in a loose-knit group of militants plotting revenge against
a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
The indictment against him portrays a man who moved easily between
different worlds. The profile that has emerged of him since his
arrest, however, suggests that Mr. Headley felt pulled between two
cultures and ultimately gravitated toward an extremist Islamic one.
“Some of us are saying that ‘Terrorism’ is the weapon of the
cowardly,” Mr. Headley wrote in an e-mail message to his high school
classmates last February. “I will say that you may call it barbaric or
immoral or cruel, but never cowardly.”
He added, “Courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim nation.”
Mr. Headley’s e-mail messages, including many that defended beheadings
and suicide bombings as heroic, are among the evidence in the
government’s case against him and his accused co-conspirator, Tahawwur
Hussain Rana, who was born in Pakistan, is a citizen of Canada and
runs businesses in Chicago.
The men, who became close friends in a military academy outside
Islamabad, were arrested last month in Chicago. They are charged with
plotting an attack they labeled the Mickey Mouse Project against
Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper whose cartoons provoked outrage
across the Muslim world.
Since then, the investigation has widened beyond Chicago and
Copenhagen. The authorities have learned more, with cooperation from
Mr. Headley, about the two men’s network of contacts with known
terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani
militant group, as well as officials in the Pakistani government and
military. United States and Indian investigators are also looking into
whether the two Chicago men, who traveled to Mumbai before the deadly
assault there last November, may have been involved in the plot.
Mr. Headley, 49, and Mr. Rana, 48, stand out from the young, poor
extremists from fundamentalist Islamic schools who strike targets in
or close to their homelands. Instead, their privileged backgrounds,
extensive travel and bouts of culture shock make them more like Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11
attacks, who attended college in the United States, and Mohammed Atta,
one of the lead hijackers.
Mr. Rana’s father is a former principal of a high school outside
Lahore. One of his brothers is a Pakistani military psychiatrist who
has written several books, and another is a journalist at a Canadian
political newspaper, The Hill Times.
Trained as a physician, Mr. Rana immigrated to Canada in 1997 and
became a citizen a few years later. Then he moved his wife and three
children to Chicago, where he opened a travel agency that also
provided immigration services on Devon Avenue, which cuts through the
heart of the city’s Pakistani community. In 2002, he started a Halal
slaughterhouse that butchers goats, sheep and cows according to
Islamic religious laws.
He and his family live in a small brick house on the North Side with a
huge satellite dish on the roof. Neighbors described Mr. Rana as a
recluse who rarely spoke to anyone and whose children never played
with others on the street.
“He seemed very committed to his Islamic religion,” said William
Rodosky, who once managed Mr. Rana’s slaughterhouse, in Kinsman, Ill.,
about 65 miles southwest of Chicago. “He said he wanted the business
so he could provide meat to his people and make a little money.”
Mr. Rodosky echoed the views of several others who knew and did
business with Mr. Rana when he said he was “shocked about the
terrorism charges.”
“As far as I knew, he was very nice man and a very good businessman,”
Mr. Rodosky said.
But Mr. Headley did not draw the same expressions of shock. Those who
knew him paint a more troubled image.
“Most people have contradictions in their lives, but they learn to
reconcile them,” said William Headley, an uncle who owns a day care
center in Nottingham, Pa. “But Daood could never do that. The left
side does not speak to the right side. And that’s the problem.”
Daood Sayed Gilani was born in Washington, where his parents worked at
the Pakistani Embassy. Friends of the family said his father, Sayed
Salim Gilani, a dashing diplomat and an avid musicologist and poet,
charmed his way into the heart of Serrill Headley, who had left
Philadelphia’s Main Line to work as a secretary at the embassy.
In 1960, the couple and their infant son, Daood, left the United
States bound for England aboard the ship America, and from there went
on to Lahore. But the marriage quickly soured, friends said, as Mr.
Gilani immersed himself in the traditions of his homeland and his
bride refused to submit to them.
After Ms. Headley left Mr. Gilani and her son and a daughter, Syedah,
in Pakistan, friends say, the details of her life become lost in a
jumble of fact and fiction. Ms. Headley, a red-haired, green-eyed
woman, told friends she married an “Afghan prince” but then had to
flee Kabul after he was murdered.
She arrived back in Philadelphia, friends said, in the early 1970s,
taking different office jobs and dating wealthy suitors until one of
them lent her money to buy an old bar. She turned it into the Khyber
Pass, decorated with billowing Afghan wedding tents and stocked with
exotic beers.
In 1977, Pakistan’s government was overthrown in a military coup, and
Ms. Headley, friends said, feared for her children. She traveled to
Pakistan, withdrew her son from the Hasan Abdal Cadet College and
brought him to live with her, a move recorded by The Philadelphia
Inquirer. (Her daughter, Syedah, stayed behind with her father for
several years.)
“He has never been alone with, much less had a date with, a girl,
except the servant girls of his household,” the article said,
referring to the teenage Daood Gilani. “But he has just this day found
a cricket team to join. And he has just this day, after watching
American TV, said to his mother in his soft Urdu-English that she is
to him like the Bionic Woman.”
According to family friends, the teenager soon rebelled against his
mother’s heavy drinking and multiple sexual relationships by engaging
in the same behavior.
“Those were the days when girls, weed, and whatever, were readily
available,” Jay Wilson, who worked at the Khyber Pass, wrote in an e-
mail message from England. “Daood was not immune to the pleasures of
American adolescence.”
Later, said Lorenzo Lacovara, another former worker at the bar, Daood
Gilani began expressing anger at all non-Muslims.
“He would clearly state he had contempt for infidels,” Mr. Lacovara
said in a telephone interview from New Mexico. “He kept talking about
the return of the 14th century, saying Islam was going to take over
the world.”
Ms. Headley tried to help her son straighten out his life. In 1985,
she put him in charge of the Khyber Pass, but he proved to be such a
poor manager that they lost the bar a couple of years later, friends
of the family said.
Ms. Headley embarked on her third marriage, and her son set off for
New York, where he opened two video rental stores in Manhattan. It is
unclear where he got the money to start the ventures. But court files
suggest that the source may not have been entirely legal.
In 1998, Mr. Gilani, then 38, was convicted of conspiring to smuggle
heroin into the country from Pakistan. Court records show that after
his arrest, he provided so much information about his own involvement
with drug trafficking, which stretched back more than a decade, and
about his Pakistani suppliers, that he was sentenced to less than two
years in jail and later went to Pakistan to conduct undercover
surveillance operationsfor the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In 2006, he changed his name to David Headley, apparently to make
border crossings between the United States and other countries easier,
court documents say. About that time, his uncle said, he moved his
family to Chicago because it had a large Muslim community and he
wanted to send his four children to religious schools.
There, the family lived in a small second-floor apartment. Mr. Headley
claimed to work for Mr. Rana’s immigration agency. The two men
attended the Jame Masjid mosque on Fridays, then stopped at the nearby
Zam Zamrestaurant to eat and talk politics. Cricket, neighbors said,
was their passion.
But Mr. Headley never seemed to fully fit in. Masood Qadir, who
sometimes watched cricket with him, said he was “different” and kept
mostly to himself.
E-mail messages show, however, that Mr. Headley stayed in regular
contact with classmates from the military high school he attended in
Pakistan, often engaging in impassioned debates about politics and
Islam.
Earlier this year, Mr. Headley complained about “NATO criminal vermin
dropping 22,000 lbs bombs on unsuspecting, unarmed Afghan villagers”
or “napalming southeast Asian farmers.” Writing about Pakistan’s chief
enemy, he said, “We will retaliate against India.”
And in an e-mail message defending the beheading of a Polish engineer
by the Taliban in Pakistan, he wrote, “The best way for a man to die
is with the sword.”
uNmaiviLambi
<nkdatta2...@bigmailbox.net> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/us/22terror.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=davi...
>
> New York
> November 22, 2009
>
> A Terror Suspect With Feet in East and West
> By GINGER THOMPSON
Whether it is these two or Nidal Malik Hussein, the Texas murderer,
education or opportunity will cannot undo the effect of islam and
koran.
Islam will make a barbarian out of a human being and justify that as
allah's commandment