Jury convict Canadian in Danish newspaper plotting attack

CHICAGO—A federal jury convicted a Canadian businessman on Thursday of helping plot an attack against a Danish newspaper that printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad but cleared him of the most serious charge accusing him of co-operating in the deadly 2008 rampage in Mumbai.

The jury reached its split verdict after two days of deliberations, finding Tahawwur Rana guilty of providing material support to terrorism in Denmark. He was found not guilty of providing material support to terrorism in relation to the Mumbai attack that left more than 160 people dead.

Rana, a Canadian national who has lived in Chicago for years, faces up to 30 years in prison.

“We’re extremely disappointed. We think they got it wrong,” defence attorney Patrick Blegen told reporters.

At the centre of the trial was testimony by the government’s star witness, David Coleman Headley, Rana’s longtime friend who previously pleaded guilty to laying the groundwork for the Mumbai attacks and planning to attack the Danish paper in retaliation for printing the cartoons that had angered many Muslims because pictures of the prophet are prohibited in Islam. That plot was never carried out.

Headley’s testimony was closely watched worldwide because it provided a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which took credit for the Mumbai attacks, and the alleged co-operation with Pakistan’s top intelligence agency known as the ISI. The trial started just weeks after Navy SEALs found Osama bin Laden hiding outside Islamabad, raising concerns that Pakistan may have been protecting the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Pakistani officials have denied the allegations and maintained that it did not know about bin Laden or help plan the Mumbai attacks.

Defence attorneys spent much of their time trying to discredit Headley, who they claim duped his friend from a Pakistani boarding school. They attacked Headley’s character saying he initially lied to the FBI, lied to a judge and even lied to his own family. They claimed he implicated Rana in the plot because he wanted to make a deal with prosecutors, something he’d learned after he became an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration after two heroin convictions.

But prosecutors claimed that Rana, 50, knew exactly what he was doing when he helped Headley. Rana, who did not testify, was on trial for allegedly allowing Headley to open a branch of his Chicago-based immigration law services business in Mumbai as a cover story while Headley conducted surveillance ahead of the November 2008 attacks. He was also accused of letting Headley, whose co-operation means he avoids the death penalty and extradition, travel as a representative of the company in Copenhagen.

Prosecutors made a Sept. 7, 2009, recorded phone call between Rana and Headley the centerpiece of their evidence against Rana. In the call, the men discussed the Mumbai attacks and Headley talked about future targets, including the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald told reporters after the verdict that he was gratified by the jury’s decision and disagreed with defence attorneys who said the verdict was conflicting because he was convicted of supporting Lashkar-e-Taiba but acquitted of charges that he helped in the Mumbai attacks.

“There’s lots of ways you could explain it, but I haven’t spoken to the jury,” Fitzgerald said. “There was clearly evidence that he knew he was working with Lashkar.”

While much of Headley’s testimony had been heard before — both through the indictment and a report released by the Indian government last year — he did reveal a few new details. Among them was that another militant leader Ilyas Kashmiri, who U.S. officials believed to be Al Qaeda’s military operations chief in Pakistan, had plotted to attack U.S. defence contractor Lockheed Martin. Kashmiri was reported killed on June 3 by U.S. drone attacks inside Pakistan. While U.S. officials haven’t confirmed the death, Pakistani officials say they’re certain Kashmiri is dead.

Headley said he worked with Kashmiri in the plot against the Danish paper, describing how the militant wanted a “stronghold approach.” One plan including taking hostages in the building and killing them quickly by beheading them.

“He said we should throw out the heads of the hostages from the windows,” Headley said of Kashmiri, speaking in a monotone and seemingly detached voice. “He said shoot them first and then behead them later, so there wouldn’t be a struggle.”

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