Years before 26/11,Headley wives told US of his LeT links

He was the Lashkars chief reconnaissance scout who set the stage for the terrorist groups strike against Mumbai on November 26,2008.

It is not clear what US authorities did with the warnings from two of Headleys three wives. Headley a longtime informer for the US Drug Enforcement Administration has pleaded guilty to planning the 26/11 attacks.

A senior administration official said Saturday,We took the information,passed it around to the relevant agencies,and what came back was that the FBI had a file on Headley,but it didnt link him to terrorism.

The latest revelations have rekindled concerns that 26/11 took place as a result of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism,much like the intelligence failures before 9/11. They also raise the question of whether officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Headleys movements because he had been an informant for the DEA. More significantly,they may provide another instance of US reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan were involved in planning the Mumbai attacks.

(In New Delhi,US Ambassador Timothy Roemer released a statement saying the US had shared with India terror-related inputs it deemed potentially credible,PTI reported. I can say that it is our policy and practice to share terrorism-related information promptly with our foreign partners,when we deem that information potentially credible and relevant to their national security, Roemer said.)

That a wife of Headleys told FBI in 2005 about her husbands Lashkar links was reported by the independent,non-profit investigative news organisation ProPublica.

Three years before Pakistani terrorists struck Mumbai in 2008,federal agents in New York City investigated a tip that an American businessman (Headley) was training in Pakistan with the group that later executed the attack, wrote ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella. The previously undisclosed allegations against Headley… came from his wife after a domestic dispute that resulted in his arrest in 2005.

In three interviews with the FBI,Headleys wife said he was an active Lashkar militant,had trained extensively in its Pakistani camps and shopped for night-vision goggles and other equipment,ProPublica reported,quoting sources. It also said she gave the authorities audio cassettes and ideological material,and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists. The report did not name Headleys wife in the interest of protecting her identity.

In several long interviews in her home,Headleys young Moroccan wife,Faiza Outalha,described to The New York Times the warnings she gave to American officials less than a year before 26/11. She said she had shown American Embassy officials in Pakistan a photo of Headley and herself in Mumbais Taj Mahal Hotel where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.

Outalha said that in two meetings at the Embassy in Islamabad in 2007,she told US officials that her husband had many friends who were known members of Lashkar. She said she told them that he was passionately anti-Indian,and that he travelled to India all the time for business deals that never seemed to amount to much.

She said she told the officials that Headley assumed different identities: devout Muslim Daood in Pakistan,and American playboy David in India.

I told them,hes either a terrorist,or hes working for you, she recalled saying to American officials at the Embassy in Islamabad. Indirectly,they told me to get lost.