Confessed Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley, who planned a murderous attack on the Copenhagen office of Jyllands-Posten newspaper, was working with the “assistance” of a network of European contacts and supporters, according to new information released by American prosecutors.
Headley, a naturalised US citizen born in Pakistan as Daood Sayed Gilani, has been in prison in Chicago since December 2009, along with Tahawwur Rana. In March 2010, Headley confessed his involvement in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, and to planning a terrorist attack against Jyllands-Posten, in revenge for the 2005 Mohammed cartoons.
As part of his plea bargain, Headley agreed to cooperate with authorities in the US, India, Pakistan and Denmark, reports The New York Times. Rana, who pleaded not guilty, is awaiting trial next month in Chicago.
It is through the expanded indictment against Rana that new information about Headley’s activities in Denmark and Europe has surfaced.
The FBI believes that Headley and Rana were both in close contact with Ilyas Kashmiri, leader of the Pakistani terrorist organisation Harakut ul Jihad al Islami, which also has connections with al-Qaeda.
It is alleged that Kashmiri provided Headley with the telephone numbers of several contacts in Europe, who were willing to provide him with money, weapons and manpower to carry out a terrorist attack against Jyllands-Posten. The other European countries were not named in the indictment.
However, according to the indictment, when Headley made his second visit to Denmark in July and August 2009 to plan the Jyllands-Posten attack, he also visited his European supporters.
The specific plan, according to the expanded indictment, was to murder at least two Jyllands-Posten employees, including an editor and one of the cartoonists. The intended victims were not named in the indictment, but are assumed to be Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the cartoons in 2005, and Kurt Westergaard, who drew the cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb-shaped turban.
The indictment alleges that Tahawwur Rana collected the money that paid for David Headley’s trip to Denmark and the other European countries and that the money was also supposed to pay for the planned terrorist attack in Copenhagen. The indictment did not reveal the original sources for the money.
Rana will be tried in Chicago next month.