US failed to name Headley despite tip off: Indian officials

Puncturing the US claim that it had shared with India the general "threat information" it had received at that time, top government officials said American authorities should have shared the name of the terrorist who had plotted the 26/11 Mumbai attacks that claimed 166 lives.

"We want to ask a simple question - did they share the name? If not, why not did they share the name," an official said, adding such a step could have resulted in his arrest.
Officials here believe that had the US shared the name after getting inputs from his two wives, Headley could have been easily arrested during his multiple visit to India prior and after the Mumbai attacks.

According to US media reports, 50-year-old Headley's American wife had given the FBI in New York a tip-off about his LeT links in 2005 while his young Moroccan wife had told authorities in the US embassy in Islamabad, less than a year before the 2008 Mumbai attacks, that he was plotting a terror strike.

Mike Hammer, spokesman of the National Security Council, White House, told PTI, "Had we known about the timing and other specifics related to the Mumbai attacks, we would have immediately shared those details with the government of India."

He said the US "regularly provided threat information" to Indian officials in 2008 before the attacks in Mumbai. "It is our government's solemn responsibility to notify other nations of possible terrorist activity on their soil," he said.

Headley's 27-year-old Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, claims she even showed the US embassy officials in Islamabad a photo of Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel, where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. "Hotel records confirm their stay," the New York Times reported.

"I told them, he's either a terrorist, or he's working for you," she recalled saying to American officials at the US embassy in Islamabad. "Indirectly, they told me to get lost," she was quoted as saying by the newspaper.