Chicago Connection to Mumbai Terror Attack

Thursday, Nov. 26, marked the first anniversary of the Islamic terrorist siege of the Indian city of Mumbai, in which 170 people were shot and blown up and more than 300 wounded. Ten killers of the Pakistan-based al Qaeda offshoot, Lashkar-re-Taibe, shot up and invaded two hotels, a train station, a café and the city’s Chabad hospitality center, holding them for three days against Indian police commandos.

The terror attack was particularly vicious. Terrorists were instructed to make sure that no one was left alive at the Jewish Chabad center: One by one, they murdered the center’s director, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his pregnant wife Rivka, Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum, Bentzion Chroman, Yocheved Orpaz and Norma Shwartzblatt Rabinovitch. The Holzbergs’ two-year old son Moshe was the only survivor thanks to the staff member, Sandra Samuel, who ran out of the inferno carrying the baby.

While the attack was prepared operationally by Lashkar-e-Taiba branches in Pakistan, the planning, reconnaissance and selection of targets were orchestrated from a covert L-e-T cell in Chicago, Illinois which the FBI broke up just last month. They found its members of Pakistani origin had been functioning for three or four years at least to orchestrate terrorist attacks on behalf of al Qaeda’s worldwide networks, the most spectacular of which was the Mumbai operation. But more were in the pipeline in India and Europe.

David Headley alias Daood Sayed Gilani, made frequent visits to the Indian city where he mixed with the Bollywood set as a cover for his activities, it is claimed. the British collected vital information that identified Headley, a US citizen living in Chicago who was arrested in October. They declined to give further details for operational reasons.

British intelligence was responsible for the arrest of another US terrorist suspect, Najibullah Zazi, 24, who was allegedly planning attacks on the New York subway when he was arrested in Denver in September.

Investigators in India are still trying to piece together Headley’s activity in the country around the crucial period, when he posed as a businessman running an immigration service.

Acting on a tip from British intelligence federal agents arrested David Headley (49), on Oct. 10 at O’Hare International Airport before boarding a flight to Philadelphia, en route to Pakistan, and his aide Tahawar Hussain Rana (48), who was arrested on Oct. 18, 2009, at his home in Chicago. The many-tentacled network continued to unravel last week, when the Italian authorities in the northern town of Breschia detained two suspects of providing financial and logistic support to the L-e-T operation.

In Headley’s  travels for scouting locations for targeting, Headley spent several nights at the targeted Mumbai hotels and the Chabad center, where he masqueraded as a religious Jew. At those sites, Headley marked out the rooms to be seized by the terrorists as assault positions and arranged for munitions to await them there.

This week, most ironically, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was visiting Washington and preparing to sign a pact for Washington and New Delhi to exchange intelligence and cooperate in the war on terror. While he has a long reckoning with Pakistan for harboring anti-Indian Muslim terrorists, the Indian prime minister had since learned that investigation of the Mumbai had led to a home-grown American cell.

Wednesday, Nov. 25, in Washington, the visiting prime minister paid homage to the Mumbai victims and vowed India would not rest until the perpetrators were brought to justice. In the past 24 hours, Pakistan has finally charged seven suspects formally with the attack, but Singh said a lot more needs to be done by Islamabad to fight terror. Indian sources suspect Pakistan timed the belated charges to win good media coverage for the Mumbai outrage’s first anniversary.