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

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Pakistan’s Consul General in Chicago personally knew both David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, nabbed by the FBI for planning to carry out a major terror attack in India at the behest of LeT, the US authorities have claimed.

The FBI in its revised chargesheet filed before a Chicago court said the Consul General of Pakistan in Chicago personally knows both Rana and Headley alias ‘Daood Gilani’, as all three of them are from the same high school.

According to the website of the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, Dr Aman Rashid is the Consul General in Chicago. “On or about September 25, 2009, Rana spoke by telephone with the Consul General at the Pakistani Consulate in Chicago in an effort to obtain a five-year visa for Headley to travel to Pakistan.

It is clear from the email traffic unrelated to terrorist plotting that the Consul General knows Rana and Headley personally as all three attended the same high school,” the FBI claimed.

However, the affidavit, a copy of which has been obtained by PTI, does not say anything if the Consul General was aware or had any inclination of the terrorist connection of Rana and Headley.

Rana (48) and Headley (49) are not only residents of Chicago, but were product of same military school in Karachi.

American national Headley, whose assistance was sought by Lashkar-e-Toiba in planning a major terror attack in India, was helped by his Pakistani-Canadian friend Rana to obtain a visa for Pakistan so that he can travel to NWFP for training and meeting the LeT leaders, federal prosecutors have charged.

The chargesheet also indicates that LeT was planning to use Headley for a major terrorist attack in India. The transcripts of the taped conversations, both email and telephone, reveals that LeT was planning to use Headley for attack on a mysterious Indian actor ‘Rahul’ which Indian intelligence agencies say could be a code message.

Headley stated that he intended to travel to Pakistan in early October to meet with an unidentified LeT Individual ‘B’ and (Ilyas) Kashmiri, the FBI told the court. It said Headley had already travelled to Pakistan from late January to early March of 2009, during which he visited FATA.

While it does not mention to which high schools the three were students, the FBI told the court that postings to a Yahoo group of graduates of a military school located in the Pakistani town of Hasan Abdal (a group that refers to itself as ‘abdalians’) reflected that both Headley and Rana have participated in the group and referred to their attendance at that school.

Cadet College Hasan Abdal is located in the Hasan Abdal a historic city in northern Punjab of Pakistan, some 40 km north west of Rawalpindi. The town with a population of 50,000 is famous for Gurdwara Sri Panja Sahib, one of the most sacred places of Sikhism.

The affidavit says the Consul General knows Headley by a different name — Daood Gilani. In seeking a visa for Headley, Rana stated that he wished to obtain the visa for a white American named “Headley” who did not have any Pakistani background at all.

“When the Consul General suggested that Rana send his friend to the consulate, Rana explained that he had sent his friend elsewhere to take care of some unspecified business so that someone else would visit the Consulate,” the FBI says.

“It is clear from the foregoing conversation that Rana was attempting to deceive the Consul General into granting a visa for Headley without the Consul General knowing for whom the visa would be issued,” the FBI told the court.

Rana told the FBI that he was aware that Headley had been affiliated with LeT, he had received training from them and he had met Kashmiri, leader of Harkat-ul-Jihad-Islami.

Rana also said that he was aware that Headley communicated with LeT Individual ‘B’ and ‘A’.

In Rana’s chargesheet, the FBI named two LeT leaders, whose names have not been identified and are referred to as LeT Member ‘A’ and LeT Member ‘B’. The FBI said the identity of both the LeT leaders are known to the Government.

LeT Member ‘A’ is an individual with substantial influence and responsibility within Lashkar-e-Taiba, while Individual ‘B’ is associated with both LeT and Kashmiri.

The FBI alleged that Headley, Rana, Individual ‘B’ and LeT Member ‘A’ have frequently used coded language and changed their methods of communications in order to conceal the nature and content of their communications.

SOURCE: TIMES NOW