David Coleman Headley is serving a 35-year prison term in the US for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks
Highlights
- Headley said Hafiz Saeed told him to teach Bal Thackeray 'a lesson'.
- He denied he planned to assassinate Pervez Musharraf.
- Headley is serving a 35-year prison term in the US.
Terrorist David Coleman Headley today alleged that the National Investigation Agency or NIA did not record his statements on the 26/11 investigations in his exact words and neither were they read out to him.
He also denied he had planned to assassinate former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and said he had no idea why the NIA claimed he had said so, raising serious questions about his earlier statement to the investigating agency.
Headley claimed JuD chief Hafiz Saeed told him, "Bal Thackeray needs to be taught a lesson." Headley said he told Saeed, "Give me six months, I will do it."
The Pakistani-American terrorist said did not have first-hand knowledge about Ishart Jahan or the Akshardham temple attack in Gujarat. He said in court today that Lashkar chief Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhavi made him meet Muzamil Bhat from whom he learnt about the two.
In his deposition to the court in February, Headley said Ishrat Jahan, the 19-year-old student killed in an encounter in Gujarat in 2004, was a member of the Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar e Taiba or LeT.
On the fourth day of his cross-examination before the Mumbai special court through videoconferencing from an undisclosed location in America, Headley said in 2003, Lakhvi had introduced Bhatt as a top LeT commander who had carried out the Akshardham Temple strike.
Headley is serving a 35-year prison term in the US for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks that killed 166 people in 2008.
Headley claimed that the NIA recorded his statements in words different from what he had told them. For instance, Headley says never said that when Lakhvi introduced him to Bhatt, he (Lakhvi) referred to him (Bhatt) sarcastically as top commander whose every major operation had failed.
"I cannot explain why NIA did not record my statement in my exact words... They never read out the statement to me after recording... I did not ask for the copy and they never gave me a copy," Headley said.
When he was shown a copy of his statement to NIA, Headley said that he was seeing it first time, but admitted that he had told NIA about an LeT women's wing which was headed by the mother of Abu Aiman.