Like Headley, Dhahri had a past with the sale and heavy use of drugs.
Like Headley, he had a violent temper: in 2004, Dhahri was convicted of throwing a roommate against a wall. The year before, he had threatened the lives of two employees in a 7-Eleven in Stockholm after they refused to let him use a telephone.
Like Headley, he was stuck between two worlds—his Tunisian background and his modern life in multicultural Sweden.
Like Headley, in his later years Dhahri became a fervent Islamist with a great hatred for Jyllands-Posten and Danes in general after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons.
Dhahri was also trained in the Islamist interpretation of war and jihad. In the two years leading up to autumn of 2010, Dhahri had suddenly vanished from the watch of the Swedish authorities. Part of the time he was most likely staying in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan, and he had contacts for the city of Miranshah, where Headley had met with the terrorist leader Ilyas Kashmiri.
When Dhahri came back from Pakistan, he traveled secretly, first to Athens and then to Brussels. Here, Sahbi Zalouti gathered him up in a car, and the men drove north to Denmark.
In Copenhagen, it became apparent that Jyllands-Posten had moved its offices to a new address at City Hall Square since Headley had made his plans. The two men ate, among other things, a burger at a restaurant in the Fisketorvet shopping center before they drove on to Stockholm.
It’s unclear if Dhahri and Zalouti had already begun planning an actual attack on the office by that point, but it’s a known fact that Dhahri had received a message from Pakistan: “Attack.”
In early December 2010, Dhahri called a certain phone number in Miranshah eighty-eight times; it was a known communication channel between Westerners and Islamic fighters. Here, he asked for Marwan or Rabani, and created the email addresses “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” for his terrorist contacts in Pakistan. But the men’s true identities remained a secret.
However, Headley and Dhahri had at least one mutual acquaintance through their contact network in Pakistan: Farid Lamrabet—the man Headley met with in Stockholm who had refused to participate in the Copenhagen attack because he was on Säpo’s watch list.
On the evening of December 6, Mounir Dhahri called Farid Lamrabet three times, and in late December he called the controversial Swede-Moroccan again from his mobile phone.
What their conversations were about is not known. But it’s certain that a few days later, Dhahri sat himself behind the wheel of a silver-gray Toyota Avensis with three passengers in the car, heading toward Denmark.
The men had been told in advance that they were to escape after the attack. And if that didn’t succeed, they were to be ready to sacrifice their lives.
“God willing, martyrdom lies at the end of this operation. What you are to do is clear: you call your family shortly before the operation and then you leave,” as Dhahri explained to one of the men.
Munir Awad took apart his mobile phone. The twenty-nine-year-old Lebanese-Swede usually did so when he traveled out of the country. That was his way of ensuring that nobody could track him in the car on the way to Denmark.
And the authorities had good reason to keep an eye on Munir Awad. Of the four men in the car, he was the most openly fundamentalist Muslim, and on several occasions he had drawn attention to himself with his views and opinions in the press. His mother-in-law, Helena Benaouda, was also known throughout the country: she was the spokeswoman for the Muslim Council of Sweden—an umbrella for the largest Muslim organizations in Sweden.
Together with his girlfriend, Munir Awad traveled to Somalia in 2007, but he was arrested at the border between Somalia and Kenya, suspected of wanting to fight for Somalia against Ethiopia. He remained in prison for three months in Addis Ababa before Säpo and the Swedish foreign ministry managed to get him out of the country. The situation received a good amount of coverage in Swedish newspapers at the time.
In 2009, he was arrested in a bus on the way to a suspected terrorist training camp in Waziristan, together with, among others, Mehdi Ghezali, who was known in Sweden as the “Guantanamo Swede” after spending two and a half years in the controversial prison in Cuba. Here, too, the Swedish authorities helped restore the men’s freedom and get them back to Sweden.
“We know that Säpo has gotten us home, and we’re very grateful,” he said to a newspaper at the time. In December 2010, the roles had shifted.
Behind the rented Toyota Avensis traveling south through Sweden toward the bridge to Denmark was another car, containing Säpo agents.
As terrorist planning had become more and more sophisticated, Säpo’s agents had also intensified their surveillance. They had installed hidden microphones in the Järfälla apartment and observed who went in and out of the door. And now, they followed the Toyota all the way to Denmark. And Säpo was there too when the fourth man in the car—the thirty-year-old Omar Abdalla Aboelazm—had been in a Swedish home improvement store called Bauhaus to buy two hundred plastic zip ties for 398 kroner.
The zip ties would be used as handcuffs. They would make it easier to behead people at Jyllands-Posten’s offices.
Omar Aboelazm was the outsider in the car. He was born and raised in Sweden but had lived in Egypt in his early childhood and in the religious city of Fez in Morocco in recent years. He had been previously convicted of a series of sexual offenses against both girls and women and had also been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome.
Omar Aboelazm was, broadly, unstable. But he had a connection to Sahbi Zalouti, who was the link between all four of the men. It was Zalouti who had organized everything, so Säpo was surprised by what happened partway through the trip to Copenhagen.
In Jönköping, the car suddenly pulled over and stopped at Statoil gas station that rented out cars. Here, the car’s rental contract was edited so that Sahbi Zalouti’s name no longer appeared on the papers. It seems he had chosen to back out at the last moment. What exactly happened before then in the car was impossible to say. Säpo hadn’t installed any microphones in the Toyota that the four had rented shortly before departing.
The car traveled on without Zalouti, who began to walk the long road back to Stockholm.
Not that he ever considered warning the authorities about the attack in Copenhagen. Instead, he walked on and thought about his shoes. It was almost 14°F, and he wasn’t excited about going home with wet feet.
The Danish authorities noted the time precisely. The Toyota rolled through the tollbooth, and at 2:02:42, on the night of December 29, 2010, three men crossed the Øresund Bridge, at which point they were on Danish soil. Säpo ended their surveillance and entrusted their colleagues from PET to keep an eye on Dhahri, Omar, and Awad.
The car rolled over Amager, past a local gas station at Sydhavnen, where the three asked for directions. From there, the trip continued on to Tivoli, where the three met a man whom PET had already been monitoring.
The man was an Iraqi refugee living in Denmark who had access to an apartment on Mørkhøjvej 82 in the Copenhagen suburb of Herlev. Zalouti had arranged for them to stay in the apartment with the Iraqi, and before he left them in Jönköping, he had given the men a handwritten note with the address on it. But he had written the street name “Mørkhøjvej” without the first J—which was apparently what had caused the men to stop in Sydhavnen to ask for directions.
The man from Iraq quickly disappeared after he let his three guests into the apartment in Herlev. The three took off their clothes, prepared three mattresses on the floor, and lay down to sleep.
A few days before, PET had been in the apartment. They had installed cameras and microphones, so they were now able to follow each and every word, each and every movement.
In all, the Danish and Swedish intelligence services performed 5,233 interceptions, wiretaps, and so on—resulting in 20 gigabytes of data—during the operation.
In the building’s parking lot, PET agents obtained access to the silver-gray Toyota
with the license plate number JXH 965. Here, they found a laptop, the two hundred zip ties, thirty-six rounds of live ammunition packed into a gray sweater, a magazine with thirty-six live rounds hidden in a checkered shirt, an automatic pistol, and a silencer.
The PET agents carefully closed the trunk.
The men in the Herlev apartment woke up, washed themselves, and prepared for the first of the day’s five prayers.
Apart from the weapons in the car, the men in the apartment had a 9mm pistol and thirty-six rounds. Dhahri also had a large sum of cash, $20,000, and 2,106 euros. The money most likely was to be used if they managed to escape after the attack.
They discussed driving into Copenhagen to have a look at Jyllands-Posten’s new offices at City Hall Square. Maybe just to observe the place. And maybe to attack the Find of the Year, which was to be held in an event space in the cellar beneath the paper’s offices that same day. Several hundred people would be participating. Among them happened to be Crown Prince Frederik.
Dhahri had explained to one of the men earlier: “We’re hoping for the best. When we go in, we’ll keep our heads away from the windows. Because in just about twenty minutes, they’ll have us surrounded. A paper like this one has many locations, but … kill everybody. If God has decided that someone’s going to be killed by a sniper, that’s what God has decided.”
The men crouched and prayed together for a blessing that they might kill the infidels.
The men quoted from the Qur’an: “When you meet the infidels, cut their heads off! The actions of those who are killed for God’s sake will not be forgotten.” It was 10:44 a.m. In just a few seconds, the door was broken down, and the Police Special Task Force stormed the apartment in full armor with masks and raised weapons. “Get down, get down!” they yelled, grabbing the men. One resisted but was quickly subdued. Shortly after, all three men were lying on the ground, yelling loudly. In the apartment in Järfälla, Sahbi Zalouti was also arrested. The terrorist attack had been thwarted.
19
THE TRUTH
Federal court, Chicago
Monday, May 23, 2011
He sat calmly in the chair at the witness stand.
“Do you solemnly swear or affirm that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
Headley carefully raised his right hand as he was sworn in, leaning forward to the microphone and nearly whispering his answer.
“Yes.”
Though he hadn’t done all that well with the whole truth thing. He had lied, manipulated, and torn reality to shreds for most of his life. That was what he was good at.
The truth? All too often, it had merely stood in the way.
It had been a good six months since Headley was arrested in the Chicago airport and driven away. A lot had happened since then. The men from Stockholm had tried to attack Jyllands-Posten. Osama bin Laden had been killed. Headley’s children were growing up and had begun asking questions about their father.
Behind bars, he had turned fifty. His hair was cut short, and behind the witness stand, he fidgeted uncomfortably with his sneakered feet.
This trial was actually of Rana, and Headley had just been called in as a witness in a case that would otherwise be best described as a journey through Headley’s own life.
On several occasions, the judge had to ask him to speak loudly and clearly. Headley didn’t care much for it. But once he got started, there was no stopping him.
Over five days, he spoke of the military academy in Pakistan. About the drug dealers. About the lecture with “the Professor” that had incited him to jihad. About the training with Lashkar. About the trips to Mumbai. About the meeting with the young woman in Denmark. About the visits to Jyllands-Posten’s offices in Copenhagen and Viby J. About the conversations with Ilyas Kashmiri. About the beheading plans. About the trips to England and Sweden.
On the other side of the closed doors in the courtroom, the FBI remained on high alert. Bomb-sniffing dogs had inspected the nineteenth floor courtroom several times, and everyone present had gone through at least two security screenings before gaining access to the courtroom.
The case was intensely covered by media from India, Pakistan, the US, Canada, and Denmark.
The prosecutors attempted to prove that Rana was aware of Headley’s plans in detail.
“There were only a few people in the world who knew what David Headley was really doing in Mumbai. One of them was Tahawwur Rana,” said prosecutor Sarah Strecker, who denied that Rana could claim in any way to be free of guilt.
“One cannot say that Rana has killed anybody. But he has helped, so it could have easily happened. Rana knew that when Headley traveled outside the country, there were people who were going to die,” Strecker said.
Rana’s team of lawyers, on the other hand, called Headley a master of manipulation, and pointed out, among other things, how Headley had lied to the FBI on several occasions, including after his arrest.
He was like a chameleon, able to change colors, personalities, and languages in just a few seconds.
While working at various times for Lashkar-e-Taiba, ISI, Kashmiri, and the American authorities, he had maintained several marriages at once. He lived several lives, and lied to everyone he came across.
“The matter will show that David Headley is trying to take all of us for a ride,” said Charlie Swift, one of Rana’s lawyers, in court.
Headley’s past had taught him that it always pays to snitch, and now he had wanted to rat out an innocent friend who had done nothing wrong—just so he could evade the death penalty, the defense lawyers explained.
Charlie Swift posed a simple question he felt could prove Rana innocent: In the many emails and wiretapped phone calls, it was clear that Headley, Pasha, Sajid Mir, and the men behind the terrorism plans in Denmark all referred to the plans as “the Mickey Mouse project,” “the northern project,” or variations on these same themes. But despite nearly three months of intense surveillance and wiretaps, the authorities had never heard Rana use these descriptions. How could that be, if Rana was as involved as the prosecution claimed? Was the truth really, perhaps, that Rana had just been used? That he, too, had gotten everything but the truth from his friend?
Since his arrest, Rana had denied his guilt in any and all matters of terrorism or murder. He maintained that if he had ever helped Headley in any way, he had been cheated by his smooth-talking, charismatic friend. Had the wool pulled over his eyes in a web of white lies, double lives, and stories of terrorism that Rana had come to take as nothing more than boasting. Rana’s defense claimed, among other things, that Rana had never even seen Headley’s videos from Denmark and that that in itself was proof that he wasn’t in the inner circle that planned the operation.
For the first thirteen months, Rana sat in isolation in the federal prison in central Chicago, and he rarely came out into fresh air. For a long time he didn’t have a clock, and therefore he didn’t know when he should pray. That took a heavy toll on him. One day, he collapsed on the floor in his cell and lay there, crying, until, after seventeen hours, he was attended by a doctor. It turned out that he had had a heart attack.
Rana’s family offered to pay one million dollars in bail so he could be released until his trial came. That was rejected, as the court feared that Rana would try to flee.
Now, Rana sat in court in Chicago. His hair had turned gray, and with his index finger resting on his lip, he listened to Headley while looking up at his old friend at the witness stand through rimless glasses. With his right hand, he wrote page after page of notes.
Only when he entered and exited the courtroom did he smile reassuringly at his wife and daughters, who had come to sit in the gallery and follow the case. In the courtroom, his focus was constantly on Headley. As if he was trying to understand him.
Rana himself didn’t speak at the trial.
One late Friday evening, Ilyas Kashmiri was drinking a cup of tea in an apple orchard outside the city of Wana in Sou
th Waziristan.
The one-eyed terrorist leader was surrounded by a number of his fighters, and through the evening they likely discussed the case against Rana, which had been going on for twelve days, six thousand miles away, in Chicago. The Pakistani media covered the cases of Headley and Rana intensely, and now, for the first time, it had been disclosed that Headley had offered the American authorities help to kill Kashmiri.
Officially, Kashmiri’s name was also on the indictment in the case in Chicago, but the Americans hadn’t managed to get hold of him. After Headley’s arrest, Kashmiri, for his part, had continued on undeterred with his plans for an attack in Europe.
Kashmiri had been the cause of terrorism warnings in Germany, France, and the UK in 2010 and 2011. It was also Kashmiri’s plans that caused American authorities in October 2010 to explicitly discourage Americans from vacationing in Europe. It may be that he had some connection to the men from Stockholm.
In the al-Qaeda network, Kashmiri took on the role of manager for the planning of attacks on the West. It had been only a few weeks since he had thought out a sophisticated attack on Pakistan’s fleet in Karachi, during which eighteen soldiers were killed.
The FBI had placed Kashmiri on the list of the world’s most dangerous men, and a week earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had delivered a short list to Pakistan with five names. The five were terrorists whom the US expected Pakistan to help find and kill.
Kashmiri was on the list.
That Friday evening, June 3, at 11:15 p.m., two missiles began descending from a drone somewhere in the sky, high over the tea party in the apple orchard.
The explosions that followed shortly afterward rattled nearby building; flames shot up everywhere. Two more missiles followed.
Ilyas Kashmiri and six or seven others were killed then and there.
“On behalf of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, 313 Brigade, we confirm the fact that our leader and commander-in-chief Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, along with other companions, have been martyred in an American drone attack,” as the statement from Brigade 313’s spokesman Abu Hunzala said the following day.
The Mind of a Terrorist Page 24