By IANS,
New Delhi : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) will charge American national and Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Coleman Headley for allegedly plotting the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks and seek to bring him to India for trial, home ministry officials said Tuesday.
“Investigations against them (Headley and his accomplice Tahawwur Hussain Rana) are still under way and we would be filing a supplementary charge-sheet for his role in 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks within a month. It would be filed in coordination with the Mumbai Police,” said a senior home ministry official here.
“We will also try to extradite Headley for trial in India,” the official said.
The development came a day after the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) charge-sheeted Headley alias Daood Gilani for conducting “extensive surveillance of targets in Mumbai for more than two years” preceding the 26/11 terrorist attack on the financial capital that killed 166 people, including six Americans.
A two-member FBI team is also in India to share case details and intelligence inputs with the NIA, which last month registered a case against Headley and Rana for plotting terror attacks in India.
Headley is already accused of plotting to murder a Danish newspaper cartoonist.
The intelligence sleuths believe that Headley was planning attacks on other Indian cities, including Lucknow and the Hindu pilgrim city of Pushkar.
He visited India at least four times – in September 2006, February 2007, April 2008, and July 2008 – posing as a Jewish-American. Before each of these visits, the FBI says, he received instructions from his Lashkar handlers in Pakistan to carry out surveillance at locations in and around Mumbai.