TWO men – David Coleman Headley, 49, and Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48 – were charged in Chicago yesterday with plotting to kill Kurt Westergaard, whose cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2005 sparked violent riots around the Muslim world.
Documents filed by federal authorities said Headley confessed to the federal agents that he conducted surveillance on Jyllands-Posten offices in Copenhagen and Arhus, Denmark, as part of a plot to attack the building. But, according to this report, Headley told agents he had refocused the plot away from the entire building and narrowed it to Westergaard and the paper’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, “whom Headley felt were directly responsible for the cartoons”.
He also allegedly told agents that he did surveillance of Danish troops that were posted nearby and that he was trained by a terrorist organisation called Lashkar-e-Taiba. He said he also worked at times with a Pakistan-based terrorist with al-Qaida links named Ilyas Kashmiri.
Headley was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts involving murder and maiming outside the United States and one count of conspiracy to provide material support to the alleged overseas terrorism conspiracy.
The FBI affidavits said that Headley described his plans to contacts in Pakistan as “the Mickey Mouse project”.
Rana, a native of Pakistan who is a Canadian citizen, was arrested earlier this month at his home on the North Side of Chicago. Rana, who owns several businesses, including a halal meat plant, is charged with conspiracy to provide material to support a foreign terrorism conspiracy that involved Headley and at least three other individuals in Pakistan.
On learning of the plot yesterday, Westergaard said:
I feel confident and safe in my private life [but] I’m angry because I have to live with threats just because I have done my job. PET (Danish police intelligence) has advised me to keep a low profile and don’t give statements. I will follow that, but I’m allowed to say that I’m angry.