Not long after his schemes led to the deaths of more than 160 people in Mumbai in 2008, David Headley had a dream.
It was early 2009 and he envisioned the Prophet Mohammed’s tomb, with his own final resting place “not next to the prophet’s grave itself, but a little distance away.”
Mr. Headley, now 50, concluded that his vision meant great heavenly rewards awaited him – if he were successful in a new attack. The plan?
Get gunmen to shoot up the Denmark offices of Jyllands Posten, so that he could avenge Islam against the newspaper that affronted God’s messenger with a cartoon.
So testified Mr. Headley in a Chicago court Thursday, where the 50-year-old convicted terrorist is giving evidence against a peripheral player, Tahawwur Rana, to save himself from the death penalty.
Mr. Headley, who has pleaded guilty to several terrorist offences but has not yet been sentenced, has now concluded a week’s worth of testimony in the trial of his lifelong best friend. An understated government witness who often gives the impression that he believes his actions to be unfailingly logical, he revealed himself as a man stitched together from irreconcilable contradictions.