FBI probing Pakistan Army Major’s terror links

LAHORE: The American intelligence sleuths stationed in Pakistan are trying to ascertain whether Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, alias Pasha, a retired major of the Pakistan Army who has recently been named by the FBI as a key link between the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack suspect David Coleman Headley and his Lashkar-e-Toiba handlers, is the brother-in-law of Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the absconding ameer of the pro-Taliban Pakistani jehadi group Harkatul Jehadul Islami (HUJI). Abdur Rehman has been charged in a Chicago court by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) on charges of conspiring terrorist attacks in association with David Headley, a US national of Pakistani-origin, who is already in the FBI’s custody.

According to well placed diplomatic circles in Islamabad, the American intelligence sleuths are trying to determine if Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed is the same person who had filed a petition in the Supreme Court of Pakistan on October 12, 2004, challenging the arrest of Qari Saifullah Akhtar and seeking his production in the apex court. The petitioner had also sought a court order to prevent possible deportation of Qari Saifullah, his brother-in-law, to another country. The petition was thrown out on January 18, 2005 and the petitioner was instructed to move the High Court by filing a habeas corpus writ petition. Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the ameer of the Pakistan chapter of the HUJI, who had been arrested in 1995 for conspiring to topple the second government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, had been named by the slain PPP leader in her posthumous book – Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West – as a principal suspect in the October 18, 2007 attempt on her life in Karachi, a few hours after her homecoming from self-exile.

Considered close to the ameer of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Mohammad Omar, Qari Saifullah Akhtar was arrested after his failed coup attempt in 1995, before being freed under mysterious circumstances in 1996 soon after the premature dismissal of the Bhutto government. He had subsequently traveled to Afghanistan, only to become advisor to Mullah Omar on political affairs. Before the US invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001, the HUJI had got membership among the Taliban cabinet as three Taliban ministers and 22 judges belonged to it. Qari was one of the few jehadi leaders who had escaped with Mullah Omar after the Allied Forces invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. He first took shelter in the South Waziristan Agency; then moved to Peshawar and eventually fled to Saudi Arabia, from where he decided to move to the UAE. Three years later, on August 6, 2004, Qari Saifullah was arrested by the UAE authorities and handed over to the Pakistani agencies, only to be deported. The arrest came after revelations during investigations of the December 2003 twin suicide attacks on Musharraf that he had been executing terrorist operations in Pakistan with the help of his men there.

Instead of trying to prosecute and convict him after his arrest, the authorities chose to keep him under detention for the next two years and nine months, without even filing any criminal charges against him in any court of law. However, a few months before Benazir Bhutto’s return home, he was quietly released under mysterious circumstances, before being arrested again in February 2008 following Bhutto’s claim in her posthumous book pertaining to his alleged involvement in the Karachi suicide bombing and the subsequent pressure created by the international community. But he was released a couple of months later on May 21, 2007 for lack of evidence. Yet the Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas refused to either confirm or deny that Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed is actually a former major of the Pakistan Army. Same was the case with the interior ministry spokesman who was of the view that the Pakistani authorities would investigate the matter and ascertain the identity of Abdur Rehman if and when officially asked by the American FBI.

According to the 42-page FBI charge sheet, Abdur Rehman coordinated with Ilyas Kashmiri, the chief of the Azad Kashmir chapter of the Harkatul Jehadul Islami (HUJI) and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, an operative of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) to commit terrorist acts involving murder and maiming outside the US, and conspired within and outside the US to provide material support to that conspiracy. David Headley, already arrested on October 3, 2009, has been charged with criminal conspiracy in the Mumbai terror attacks and having links with Abdur Rehman who liaised between him and terror groups including LeT and HUJI. The charges filed in the federal court in Chicago said Headley, 49, conducted extensive surveillance of targets in Mumbai for more than two years preceding 26/11, and supplied pictures and videotapes of targets to the attackers. He was charged with six counts of conspiracy to bomb public places in India, murder and maim persons in India and Denmark, provide material support to foreign terrorist plots, provide material support to the LeT, and six counts of aiding and abetting the murder of US citizens in India.

As far as Major (retd) Abdur Rehman is concerned, he has been charged with participating in planning a terrorist attack in Denmark, and coordinating with Headley in his surveillance of the intended targets. Rehman alias Pasha, referred to as individual A in the FBI documents, corresponded with Headley beginning late 2008 by email or telephone in coded language regarding the “Micky Mouse Project” — their plot to attack the facilities of a Danish newspaper. After traveling to Copenhagen, Headley visited Pakistan wherein Rehman took him to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to solicit Ilyas Kashmiri’s participation in the plot. Following his return from Pakistan, Headley communicated with the LeT leader. The FBI has also released transcripts of a series of telephone calls between Headley and Rehman on reports of Ilyas Kashmiri’s death in an American drone attack in South Waziristan which eventually proved faulty. Kashmiri is considered to be one of the most dangerous al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani commanders. No. 4 on the Pakistani Ministry of Interior’s Most Wanted list, Kashmiri was a veteran of the Kashmir jehad who had spent several years in an Indian jail after being arrested from Jammu & Kashmir.

While the Pakistan chapter of HUJI is led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar, its Azad Kashmir chapter, which is autonomous, was headed by Ilyas Kashmiri. He was arrested by the Pakistani authorities after the December 2003 twin suicide attacks on General Musharraf’s presidential cavalcade in Rawalpindi, but released in February 2004 due to lack of evidence. After being released, Kashmiri switched from the freedom struggle in Jammu Kashmir to the Taliban-led resistance against the NATO forces in Afghanistan and shifted his base to South Waziristan to join hands with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) led by Commander Baitullah Mehsud. In May 2009, Ilyas Kashmiri was accused of plotting the assassination of the Army Chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, in collusion with al-Qaeda, largely because of the COAS’s lead role in the ongoing war against terrorism. He was also named in a charge sheet filed by the Islamabad police in the November 2008 gruesome murder of Major General (retd) Amir Faisal Alvi, the former General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Pakistan Army’s Special Services Group (SSG).

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