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Nov21
Headley’s US crime record
Filed under: News & Views; Tagged as: american passport, ashok kumar, attri, community activists, consul general, david coleman, drug enforcement agency, drug trafficking, embassy in washington, external affairs ministry, felony conviction, heroin and cocaine, indian authorities, indian consulate in chicago, indian embassy in washington, indian visa, intelligence officials, lax oversight, pakistani diplomat, pennsylvania nativeNo Comments
Daaod Gilani, suspected of involvement in the 26/11 Mumbai carnage and one of the two Pakistani expats charged with transcontinental terror plots, is a convicted felon who served 15-month prison sentence in US in 1999 before he changed his name to David Coleman Headley, a camouflage that may have helped him get a long-term Indian visa.The discovery of the felony conviction becomes important in the context of the growing controversy over how he got a long-term Indian visa from the Indian consulate in Chicago, where the consul-general Ashok Kumar Attri is under fire for lax oversight. Some Indian community activists who have been campaigning against Attri for long have sought his recall.
The External Affairs Ministry in New Delhi and the Indian Embassy in Washington have said Attri acted within the purview of current rules and did not break any law, but intelligence officials are bristling at the loopholes that enabled Gilani/Headley to mask a conviction that should have raised a red flag.
According to US court records, Gilani, who took his mother’s last name Headley in 2006, was involved in a drug trafficking case in Philadelphia in 1997. He appears to have pled guilty and helped authorities in the case to earn a reduced sentence, because accounts of the episode, which give his full name as Sayyid Daood Saleem Gilani, say he aided Drug Enforcement Agency agents monitor an operation involving smuggling of a huge consignment of heroin and cocaine.
The fact that Headley-Gilani’s birthplace on his American passport is listed as Washington DC, effectively masking his Pakistani pedigree, appears to have fooled Indian authorities in Chicago. But information being pieced together now shows that he was the son of a Pakistani diplomat Saleem Gilani, who was posted in the U.S in the late sixties, and Serrill Headley, a Pennsylvania native who lived in the capital region those days.
The couple moved back to Pakistan after Daaod was born in the US but they split up soon after in the early 1970s when Serrill returned to US to eventually start a bar and restaurant called Khyber Pass in Philadelphia. In 1977, after at least two attempts, she got custody of the young Daood Gilani, who was at the Hasan Abdal Cadet College in Pakistan at that time.
Transported to Philadelphia, Daood apparently suffered from culture shock. Raised a Muslim, he had trouble adjusting to the idea that his mother ran a bar, according to a report that that time in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which traced his background in a story on Thursday. “He has never been alone with, much less had a date with, a girl, except the servant girls of his household,” the paper quoted a column from that time from its archives.
Serill Headley turned over the business to her son in 1985 but he quickly ran it into the ground, according to current owners of the restaurant. Meantime, he is said to have studied accounting, possibly at a community college in the Philadelphia region, and operated a video store, FliksVideo, with his mother.
A 2008 obituary of Serrill Headley in the Philadelphia Inquirer described her as an ”adventuress who contributed to Philadelphia’s restaurant renaissance when she opened Khyber Pass Pub in the 1970s.” It said she had purchased a neighbourhood bar on Second Street near Chestnut (now a trendy area) in which ‘’she left the regulars sitting at their stools arguing politics, while she transformed the surroundings with Pakistani wedding tents.”
Khyber Pass itself merited an Inquirer obituary when it closed in 1988, with the paper describing it as a ‘’saloon institution for the last 14 years” that ”provided a performing venue for all kinds of Philadelphia bands.” Its proprietor, Serrill Headley, blamed the closing on “tax problems and absentee management” caused by a long illness and an auto accident a year ago that left her with back and leg injuries, it said.
In Washington DC, there was no recollection in the diplomatic circuit of Saleem Gilani although archives showed a Director General of Pakistan Radio by the same name. But investigators are digging back into the records, also because the name Gilani (also spelt Jilani) has raised red flags in India, notwithstanding the fact that the Prime Minister of Pakistan shares the same name.
Source: TimesNow
Tags: american passport, ashok kumar, attri, community activists, consul general, david coleman, drug enforcement agency, drug trafficking, embassy in washington, external affairs ministry, felony conviction, heroin and cocaine, indian authorities, indian consulate in chicago, indian embassy in washington, indian visa, intelligence officials, lax oversight, pakistani diplomat, pennsylvania native
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