School friends to collaborators in terror: The Rana-Headley nexus

In the early months of 2009—sometime between February and March—David Coleman Headley called his friend Dr Tahawwur Rana in Chicago to make him hear an audio tape in which at least five top commanders of the Pakistani terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) could be heard giving detailed instructions to the ten men who had been sent to Mumbai on a suicide mission in November 2008.

- Abhishek Sharan

MUMBAI: One of the men particularly impressed Rana. This was Sajid Majid alias Sajid Mir alias Wasi, one of the absconding masterminds of 26/11. "After hearing him deliver instructions on the tape, Dr Rana said to me that what Sajid had accomplished was akin to what Khalid Ibn Walid had done," Headley told a two-member team of the National Investigation Agency which interrogated him in June 2010. Khalid Ibn Walid is a 7th-century Arab military general revered for his derring-do.

As Tahawwur Rana—only the second man after Ajmal Kasab—to be caught for the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack that killed 166 people, reached India on Thursday following his extradition from the United States, it’s instructive to keep in mind that Rana’s story and his fate is inextricably linked to that of David Coleman Headley. The two men, both 64, met for the first time as schoolboys at the posh residential school, Cadet College at Hasan Abdal, Attock, in Pakistan. The school, whose motto is ‘Second to None’ was where the sons of Punjab’s elite went to become citizens of the world. Rana, son of a high school principal, decided to befriend Headley, then known as Daood Gilani, the son of a bureaucrat who stood out for being biracial and for his heterochromia (having eyes of two different colours).

Over the years, even though they followed different paths, the two men remained close friends. Headley moved back to Philadelphia to be with his mother after his parents’ divorce and eventually began dabbling in the twin trades of narcotics and information. Indian investigators believe him to have acted as a double agent who worked for the LeT and the Pakistani deep state as well as for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).