“And Inshallah, the present pharaoh America will see our full revenge very soon. Our only target is America.”
Kashmiri’s body has never been found, and parts of the Indian intelligence agency are still convinced that Kashmiri survived the attack. The UN considers it “overwhelmingly likely” that Kashmiri was killed in the American drone attack.
The journalist behind the only lengthy interview with Ilyas Kashmiri, Syed Saleem Shahzad, was found dead in a canal in Pakistan just four days after the drone attack in the apple orchard. A connection between the two killings has never been documented, but the journalist had told close friends shortly before then that he feared for his life and that the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, was out to kill him. Less than two weeks before his death, Syed Saleem Shahzad had published a book with detailed information about Ilyas Kashmiri.
In Chicago, Rana’s trial was coming to an end. During his closing remarks, prosecutor Daniel Collins brought up an email on a large screen. The email was from the advertising salesperson at Jyllands-Posten, who had written to Headley in good faith after the visit at Kongens Nytorv in January 2009.
“Thank you for your visit at Jyllands-Posten Friday last week,” it said on the screen.
“Think about that. They wrote him a thank-you,” Daniel Collins said, raising his voice. “If the newspaper had known what the accused knew, they would not have said thanks. They would have said: Oh God, get out of here! What happened in Mumbai was disgusting, and the plans against Denmark were disgusting. The poor people at Jyllands-Posten said thank-you for the visit of a trained terrorist who sought after death and destruction in Denmark! They could have been beheaded.”
Collings looked at the jury, making eye contact with them one at a time.
“The innocent people in Mumbai, and the many people at the newspaper deserve justice. Use your reason, dear jurors. This man knew that his friend was a terrorist. He helped him. And when you recognize this truth, you will do what is right. And you will find him guilty,” said Collins, sitting down.
In Chicago, the jury took barely two days to reach a verdict. And before it was read, it was decided that the jurors’ names would remain secret. For their safety. The jury found Rana guilty of being an accomplice to the terrorist plans against Denmark and of providing support to Lashkar-e-Taiba.
He was, however, acquitted of providing direct support to the attack in Mumbai, and it was also the jury’s finding that nobody had lost their lives as a result of Rana’s involvement in Headley’s terrorist activities.
The judge in the case, Harry D. Leinenweber, declared during the sentencing in January 2013 that it was beyond any doubt that Rana was a loving man with a large family of which he took good care.
“It is, however, difficult to understand how Rana became involved in this cowardly plan to attack the offices of a private newspaper because of one artist’s work. The mere thought of it goes against what people say about Rana’s personality. It is difficult to comprehend.”
Rana was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for his support of David Headley’s terrorism plans. Through his lawyers, Rana explained that under no circumstances did he wish to speak to Headley again. Their friendship was over.
As prisoner number 22829–424, Rana is now serving his sentence at Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles, where, among other things, he sits together with a member of the eco-terrorism group Earth Liberation Front, which planned to blow up a dam in California in 2007.
Rana is expected to be released on December 28, 2021, fifteen days before his sixty-first birthday. He will thereafter be deported from the United States. There is still no known evidence showing that Rana sought to incite terrorism—except in Headley’s company.
David Headley, since his arrest, has helped the authorities to unravel several terrorist plots. It is his defense attorney’s judgment that Headley’s help has saved “hundreds, if not thousands” of human lives. The contents of Headley’s revelations remain closely guarded secrets, but his cooperation is described by the American authorities as the most comprehensive ever provided by a top terrorist.
The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, called the information Headley provided “a valuable insight into terrorist leader Ilyas Kashmiri’s thought process and plans…. We need that kind of information. The Indian authorities need information. The Pakistani authorities need it. And the Danish authorities need it,” Fitzgerald said.
Through his close cooperation, Headley avoided a lengthy trial that likely would have gotten him the death penalty, due to the killing of six Americans in Mumbai. He also ensured that he will never be extradited for judicial proceedings in India, Pakistan, or Denmark, either now or at any time in the future.
Danish authorities have never requested that Headley be put on a plane for Copenhagen, while India, on the other hand, is still fighting to get its hands on the highest-ranked terrorist currently behind bars for the attack in Mumbai.
Most recently, India has suggested that David Headley be extradited for one year, after which he will be sent back to the US. The American authorities categorically refused this suggestion, but Headley did—via video link—briefly participate as a witness in a trial in Mumbai in February 2016.
When Headley’s sentence was finally decided in January 2013, one of the survivors of the Mumbai attack spoke. Linda Ragsdale, from Nashville, Tennessee, found herself at Tiffin Restaurant in the Oberoi-Trident Hotel during the attack, with a group of friends, including Alan Scherr and his thirteen-year-old daughter Naomi, both of whom were killed.
“I saw the carnage of war in a place where moments before friends and families were enjoying their meals,” Linda Ragsdale told the court.
“I know what a bullet can do to every part of the human body. I know the thick and sweetening—sickeningly sweet smell of gunfire and blood. I know the sound of life leaving a thirteen-year-old child. These are things I never needed to know, never needed to experience.”
Linda Ragsdale emphasized that she did not wish for Headley to die. Only that he remain eternally silent, isolated in a cell.
“I don’t know you. I know you only from the testimony in this courtroom. In this light and understanding, I would not kill you, nor would I send other people to kill you, nor would I train others, nor would I come back in thirty years and attack an arbitrary location in Pakistan to kill innocent people as retribution for your actions,” Linda Ragsdale said, explaining that her hope was that Headley might one day dare to be a man “and not bargain away the life of others for your own salvation.”
Headley today claims that he regrets what he has done.
In a letter to the federal court in Chicago from January 2013, he wrote that he now “believe[s] in American values and way of life, and certainly wish my children to be raised that way.” He also claims that he has reread the religious texts Lashkar showed him at that time, and now sees that the texts were taken “out of context.”
“Your Honor, I request clemency and another chance to redeem myself. I am capable of change, and feel I can still make some positive contributions—even in this late stage of life,” Headley wrote in a letter to the judge before his sentencing. Judge Leinenweber was of another mind.
“I don’t have any faith in Mr. Headley when he says he’s a changed person and believes in the American way of life,” Leinenweber said, declaring that for his actions, Headley deserved life in prison without any doubt.
But his cooperation with the authorities meant that, instead, the judge had to set the sentence at between thirty and thirty-five years.
Leinenweber gave Headley thirty-five years in prison without any further thought.
“It is my hope that this sentence will hold Hedley under lock and key for the rest of his life,” he said.
With the current rules and the time he already had served, Headley will be a free man shortly before his seventy-ninth birthday in the summer of 2039.
In the summer of 2013, the White House reported that the tr
acking and arrest of David Headley succeeded with the help of one of the highly controversial surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency. However, the American government has never put forth any evidence for this claim, which is strongly doubted by international experts.
The convictions of Rana and Headley have not caused American authorities to close the investigation into the planned terrorist attack on Denmark. Federal authorities have acknowledged that they should have exposed Headley far earlier.
Headley has said that he wishes to perform religious work when he eventually gets out of prison—to set straight all the misunderstandings about Islam that abound in the media. He feels he’s the right man for the job.
Today, Headley is prisoner 39828–066 in a top secret prison at a secret address “somewhere in the US,” as part of the FBI’s protection of criminal witnesses.
He is allowed to watch TV and regularly follows the news, but in letters from the prison, he has recounted that the authorities deliberately make his life difficult, and letters to and from him are thoroughly vetted for hidden codes and messages. Sometimes, they’re delayed for up to five months for the same reasons.
Several family members, as well as many friends, have turned their backs on him, but it’s not known if Headley is still in direct contact with his children and his wife Shazia, or if she followed Headley’s advice in his will and has traveled back to Pakistan. Shazia was never indicted in the case, despite her documented knowledge of Headley’s terrorist activities.
Headley has sworn on the Qur’an that he will no longer make contact with his other wife, Faiza. She herself has said she hasn’t heard from him since his arrest.
Behind bars, Headley remains a devout Muslim, citing in a letter the Qur’an verse sent to him from Pakistan when his father died: “And we will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits. But give good tidings to the patient, who, when disaster strikes them, say, ‘Indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return.’ Those are the ones upon whom are blessings from their Lord and mercy. And it is those who are the rightly guided.”
In prison, Headley—on the advice of a Muslim scholar—has begun learning the Qur’an by heart, and he still believes that “everything that has happened to us, or will happen in the future, has been predetermined by Allah, mighty and majestic.”
He once again signs his letters as Daood.
AFTERWORD
The Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) has in recent years been involved with several terrorist cases in Denmark but as of 2016 still sees the Headley case as among the most serious due to its international reach.
At PET’s Center for Terrorism Analysis (CTA), it is said that the matter of the cartoons has given Denmark the status of a “high-priority terrorism target” and that this status is cemented in the militant Islamist state of mind. Indeed, Denmark is still considered a “legitimate” target by al-Qaeda and other militant Islamists.
Indeed, the threat of a revenge attack for Jyllands-Posten’s Muhammad cartoons is higher than ever, according to PET.
The number of cases where one sees “concrete planning of attacks and/or attempted attacks against Denmark or Danish interests in other countries” as a result of the cartoons “has increased in the 2010–2012 period,” and is now higher than in the first period, after the drawings were published (2005–2008) and after their second printing (2008–2010), according to CTA.
“This development emphasizes the continued focus on Denmark among militant Islamists, and that there is still a serious terrorist threat to Denmark. CTA considers that this trend will continue in coming years.”
And the threat is not just empty words. In February of 2015 a twenty-year-old male with roots in Palestine killed two Danes and wounded five police officers in a terror attack in central Copenhagen. The terrorist was shot dead by Danish police late at night.
Hafiz Saeed—the leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba—remains a free man. “The Professor” has on several occasions called for new attacks and declared that “one Mumbai is not enough.” Today, he lives in a restricted area in a residential district of Lahore, surrounded by armed guards, but claims that he is not worried by the bounty placed on his head by the Americans. “My fate is in the hands of God, not America,” as he said to the New York Times in 2013, when he encouraged political solutions instead of violence.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is still considered one of the most active and most professional terrorist organizations in Southern Asia. According to experts, Lashkar today has a larger network in Europe than it did before the Mumbai attack, but it is uncertain whether its network is capable of being used for major terrorist attacks.
Sajid Mir, Pasha, and several others with connections to Lashkar-e-Taiba are still at large, and they likely remain based outside Pakistan. Unsurprisingly, American authorities consider them “dangerous.” They are still wanted for the planning of the terrorist attack on Jyllands-Posten.
Al-Qaeda continues to directly threaten Denmark, despite Osama bin Laden having since died. Their threat was renewed, among other times, in January 2013, when the group promised an attack described as “violent, serious, alarming, like an earthquake, shocking and terrifying.” On a known Islamist web page, the group wrote: “Where will the next strike by al Qaeda be? The answer for it, in short: The coming strikes by al Qaeda, with God’s Might, will be in the heart of the land of nonbelief, America, and in France, Denmark, other countries in Europe.”
The rise of the terrorist organization ISIS and the attack in Paris, France, in 2015 against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has done nothing to ease the fears of a major attack against Jyllands-Posten.
Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone survivor of the ten attackers from the Mumbai attack, was sentenced to death by a court in Mumbai.
“To be hanged by the neck till death,” said Judge Tahaliyani, adding that Kasab had lost any right to “humane treatment.” The majority of death sentences handed down in India are commuted to life imprisonment, and though more than four hundred sit on India’s death rows, before the Mumbai attack only two death sentences were carried out in the previous fifteen years.
On November 12, 2012, Kasab secretly received word that the authorities would soon be carrying out his death sentence. Kasab didn’t write a will, or any letters, and he had but one wish: that his mother in Pakistan receive word as soon as possible that he had been hanged. The following week, Kasab was moved from his maximum-security cell in Arthur Road prison in Mumbai and secretly sent to Yerwada prison in Pune. There, he was hanged at 7:30 a.m., Wednesday, November 21, 2012, just a few days before the four-year anniversary of the Mumbai attack.
Nobody had requested that his body be delivered, so Kasab was buried on the prison grounds. The hanging took place in secret to avoid protests or celebrations. Later that day, the public learned for the first time of Kasab’s death.
“The majesty of the Indian justice system has been upheld. We have done better than the Americans, who could not try Osama bin Laden and had to liquidate him. But we went through the due process of law,” said Prithviraj Chavan, political leader of the Indian state of Maharashtra that same evening.
The remaining nine attackers from Mumbai were buried secretly—and only after several months since the attack, as local Muslims initially refused to bury the men in sacred grounds. Their burial places are still kept secret.
Major Iqbal—Headley’s connection to the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI—has never been identified. Headley himself claims he never heard Iqbal’s first name. The Americans remain convinced, though, that Iqbal continues to work in Pakistan with ISI’s approval. Officially, ISI has no knowledge of Iqbal.
Jyllands-Posten no longer has offices or any other connection to Kongens Nytorv. Extra security at the new City Hall Square office, and at the Viby J headquarters near Aarhus, has cost them “significant sums,” but the precise amount remains a secret. JP/Politikens Hus reveals
that currently, “about 1.5 million dollars per year” is spent on security. The paper has, since Headley’s plans became known, retained a former PET agent as the head of security.
Kurt Westergaard, the man behind the drawing of the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, was sent on vacation by Jyllands-Posten a few weeks after David Headley’s plans were revealed. After his vacation, he retired from his position as a permanent artist at Jyllands-Posten after twenty-eight years. The original cartoon of Muhammad is “hidden safely away,” Westergaard says.
Today, Westergaard calls the Muhammad drawings “catalysts in a necessary process” in the debate on freedom of expression—a debate that could just as well come up about a film or a novel, but “now, it happened to be my drawing.” He regrets nothing, though he continues to receive death threats and will likely have to live with police protection for the rest of his life. In January 2010, Mohamed Geele—a twenty-eight-year-old man of Somali background—tried to kill Westergaard. Geele broke into Westergaard’s home armed with an axe. The artist probably survived only because he sought shelter in his bathroom, which had been converted into a safe room. Geele was sentenced to ten years in prison and will be deported afterward.
Kurt Westergaard continues to give talks about his experiences with the drawing.
Flemming Rose left Jyllands-Posten after sixteen years in 2015, deciding to use his time to write books and debate free speech all over the world. He published the book The Tyranny of Silence in 2010, in which he gives his personal take on why it was he who ended up in the spotlight, so to speak, after the Muhammad cartoons.
“I’ve become a widely controversial figure, one whom many people love to hate, and one whom some people even wish to kill. I’ve racked my brain to find an explanation for an apparent paradox: I’m no provocateur, I’m not on an endless hunt for conflict for the sake of conflict, and it does not satisfy me to see people get upset about anything I’ve said or done.”
The Mind of a Terrorist Page 25