Scout in Mumbai attacks was DEA informant while in terror camp, authorities say
Federal officials acknowledged Saturday that David Coleman Headley, the U.S. businessman who confessed to being a terrorist scout in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was working as a Drug Enforcement Administration informant while training with terrorists in Pakistan.
Federal officials, who spoke only on background because of the sensitivity of the Headley case, also said they suspect a link between Headley and the al-Qaeda figures whose activities have sparked recent terror threats against Europe.
The revelations came after a report Friday by ProPublica and The Washington Post that the FBI had been warned about Headley's terrorist ties three years before the Mumbai attacks. Headley was arrested 11 months after those attacks.
After he was arrested in a 2005 domestic dispute in New York City, his wife told federal investigators about his long involvement with the terrorist group Lashkar-i-Taiba and his extensive training in its Pakistani camps. She also told them he had bragged about being a paid U.S. informant while undergoing terrorist training.
Despite a federal inquiry into the tip, Headley spent the next four years doing terrorist reconnaissance around the world. Between 2006 and 2008, he did five spying missions in Mumbai scouting targets for the attack by Lashkar that killed 166 people, including six Americans.
Link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/16/AR2010101604458.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR
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