The FBI team is expected to share with the officers of the India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) information the interrogators elicited from the Pakistan-born LeT operatives David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Rana, who were arrested in the US last October. The American and Indian agencies are also probing the duo’s links with the terrorists, who carried out the attacks in Mumbai on November 26 last year.
“Headley and Rana, their involvement in various crimes are being investigated. The FBI team is here and we have been promised total support from the US investigating agencies,” External Affairs Minister S M Krishna said.
Headley, a Pakistan-born US citizen, was arrested by the FBI from Chicago on October 3 last.
This was followed up with the arrest of Rana, a Canadian citizen born in Pakistan, from the same city a fortnight later.
The duo was primarily charged with plotting a terrorist attack in the office of the Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten newspaper at Viby J in Denmark. Subsequent probes by the FBI indicated that Headley and Rana might have been involved with planning the attacks in Mumbai as well as with plotting other terrorist attacks in India and Bangladesh too.
NIA registered a case against Headley and Rana for plotting and abetting terrorist attacks in the country. Headley visited India several times before and after the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai. He is suspected to have provided photographs, maps and other details of the Taj Hotel, Oberoi Trident Hotel, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and Nariman House to the 10 LeT terrorists, who sailed into the city through Karachi.
A spokesperson of the US embassy in New Delhi, Elizabeth Fitzsimons, said the FBI and Department of Justice briefed the Indian sleuths on the suspected roles of Headley and Rana in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
The FBI team comprised of agents from its office in Chicago. Sources said they shared with their NIA counterparts a dossier, which contained details of Headley's and Rana's cell-phone and e-mail communication with perpetrators of the attacks in Mumbai.
The US embassy spokesperson said that the FBI and Justice Department team would also travel to Pakistan to probe the links of Headley and Rana there.
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