M A I N   N E W S

Headley stayed at Taj
His associate Rana left Mumbai 5 days ahead of 26/11
Ajay Banerjee
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, November 13
David Headley, the US-based terror suspect who was arrested by the FBI for planning strikes in India, had stayed at Mumbai’s Taj hotel. And his Canadian-Pakistani associate Tahawwur Hussain Rana had left Mumbai only five days ahead of last year’s audacious strikes by the Lashkar-e-Toiba there.

Official sources said investigations have revealed that Headley stayed at Taj, the hotel that bore the maximum brunt of the LeT-sponsored strikes, between March 28 and March 30, 2007. During this period, he stayed in room number 1809, they said. Headley came back to the hotel on May 2, 2007, and stayed in room number 314 till May 7.

Rana, who too is under FBI custody, had stayed in a guest house in south Mumbai till November 21, 2008, before flying off to a European destination on way back to Canada. These visits, as per sources, have raised suspicion whether the duo gave final touches to 26/11 attacks that left 183 persons dead, including some those from the US and UK.

Meanwhile, the movement of the duo has baffled Indian investigators, who are now sifting through a pile of railway, hotel and telephone call records pertaining to the duo.

Such kind of meticulous planning, sources in the Union Home Ministry said, indicated a military-style preparation and a bigger game plan that was being masterminded elsewhere. It was now very clear that instructions to the duo were coming from Pakistan, as they were making regular calls to the neighbouring nation, sources said.

Along with other details, investigators are presently busy ascertaining what the bigger game plan was. “We have to look beyond the 26/11 attacks and find out what was coming,” an official said.

Each emerging detail was being looked into and one of that was whether the duo were planning simultaneous multiple strikes across several locations in India, say investigators, pointing out that it would take up to six weeks to connect all loose ends.

Notably, it has been confirmed that Headley stayed in India for over 13 months, the period spread across his nine visits between 2006 and 2009. Rana visited India only once and stayed here for a month. Another thing that needed to be probed was whether Rana travelled to India on some other identity or passports.

A source said the duo preferred to travel by rail in India. The fact that some Indian was providing logistics — doing hotel and train bookings, providing cars and even Indian currency — to them was also being probed.

The duo, it is learnt, used landline phones and mobiles to contact their “handlers” in Pakistan. Telephone calls have been traced to several numbers in Pakistan, an official said. But, the officials as of now refused to identify their patrons in Pakistan, saying “it was too early and the evidence should be allowed to build up first”. (With PTI inputs)

Headley Probe
Records seized from hotels in Delhi
Sandeep Yadav
Tribune News Service