Investigators are trying to piece together details of the India visits of Rana and his associate David Coleman Headley, and their potential links to the 26/11 attacks.
Tahawwura Hussain Rana, one of the two Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operatives arrested in the US for planning to attack targets in India and Denmark, may have lived in Bhiwandi on his India visit just before the 26/11 attacks.
Investigators are trying to piece together details of the India visits of Rana and his associate David Coleman Headley, and their potential links to the 26/11 attacks.
Between 2006 and 2008, Headley ran a business in Mumbai and traveled several times to India. It is still not clear how many times Rana visited India.
What is confirmed is that Rana was in Mumbai for several days before the 26/11 attacks, and left the city just five days before the 10 terrorists landed. Sources in the security establishment are now “almost certain” that Rana, a Pakistan-born Canadian citizen who ran an immigration business in the US, stayed in Bhiwandi before the attack.
According to sources, Rana spent 10 days in Mumbai in November last year, leaving the city just five days before the attacks. According to immigration details, Rana came from Dubai to the Mumbai airport, and returned to the Gulf region.
Investigators are also now working on the premise that Rana may have traveled to Gujarat during his stay in Mumbai. It is not clear where all in Gujarat he went.
Meanwhile, investigators have told DNA that among the contact details of “curiosity” that they have found in the records of Headley from his Mumbai days are the numbers of Islamic
Research Foundation. The Mumbai-based foundation, which owns the Peace TV, is headed by the controversial Islamic preacher Dr Zakir Naik.Dr Naik is hugely popular, but is criticised by many for his retrograde and questionable claims. Among those is his statement that the 9/11 attacks in the US was an insider’s job by George Bush. #
American and Indian investigators believe that both Rana and Headley were linked to a LeT-HUJI network that had presence in Bangladesh and was behind several terror strikes in South India. Shahid Bilal, a Hyderabad resident who was behind most of those attacks and who was killed mysteriously in Karachi in 2007, was also part of that network. The network was controlled by a LeT leader by the name of Syed Abdul Rahman.
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