LONDON: The Inter-Services Intelligence played a major role in helping prepare the 2008 Mumbai attacks, one of the planners of the bloodbath has told Indian interrogators, a report in British newspaper Guardian claimed on Tuesday.
David Headley, who confessed to surveying targets for the attacks that left 166 people dead in November 2008, made detailed claims about support from the ISI, said the Guardian. Headley described dozens of meetings between officers of the ISI and senior militants from Laskhar-e-Tayyaba, said the paper, citing a 109-page Indian government report into his interrogation.
India blames Laskhar-e-Tayyaba – a banned Pakistan-based group – for masterminding the Mumbai attacks. The Guardian said Headley claimed the ISI was attempting to strengthen militant organisations with links to the Pakistani state which were being marginalised by more extreme groups.
Headley, the son of a former Pakistani diplomat and a white American woman, claimed that at least two of his missions were partly paid for by the ISI and that he regularly reported to the spy agency, the British daily said.
“The ISI… had no ambiguity in understanding the necessity to strike India,” Headley is cited as telling the Indian investigators, who reportedly interviewed him over 34 hours in the US in June.
The documents suggest, however, that the ISI’s supervision of the militants was often chaotic and that most senior officers in the agency may have been unaware of the scale of the attacks before they were launched, added the paper. An ISI spokesman told the Guardian that the accusations were “baseless”.
In the Mumbai attacks, 10 heavily-armed gunmen launched a three-day assault on prime targets in India’s financial capital. Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani, confessed to his role in plotting the attacks after being arrested in the US.
