Pakistan Intelligence Agency Helped Plan Mumbai Terror Attack

India has long maintained that ISI supports terrorism.
Pakistan Intelligence Agency Helped Plan Mumbai Terror Attack
10/19/2010
Updated:
10/1/2015

<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/103350470.jpg" alt="Visitors walk through the newly-restored heritage wing of Mumbai's landmark Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel on Aug. 11, 2010. (Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images)" title="Visitors walk through the newly-restored heritage wing of Mumbai's landmark Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel on Aug. 11, 2010. (Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1813304"/></a>
Visitors walk through the newly-restored heritage wing of Mumbai's landmark Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel on Aug. 11, 2010. (Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images)
Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) was deeply involved in planning the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, India, a convicted terrorist told Indian intelligence.

The attack, which killed 166 people, was blamed on the banned Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group but, according to top-secret Indian documents obtained by U.K.’s The Guardian, it may have been partially planned and funded by the Pakistan government agency.

India has long maintained that ISI supports terrorism. The U.S. government has also accused the agency of cooperating with the Taliban to attack U.S. and NATO forces. Pakistan officially banned LeT in 2002, but the organization continues to function.

David Headley, a U.S. citizen convicted of helping scout for the attack, claims the attacks were funded and planned by the ISI to prevent further divisions between Pakistani terrorist groups.

Headley, a Pakistani-American who changed his name from Daood Gilani, was arrested in the United States and interrogated there by Indian officials who produced a 109-page report of his statements.

ISI feared that more radical Taliban-supported groups, which were gaining strength in Pakistan, could undermine the government, and so planned a large operation through LeT to win back support among Pakistani extremists, the report states.

“The ISI … had no ambiguity in understanding the necessity to strike India,” Headley told interrogators, according The Guardian. The agency hoped to prevent a “further split in the Kashmir-based outfits, providing them a sense of achievement and shifting … the theater of violence from the domestic soil of Pakistan to India.”

Senior ISI officials were not fully aware of the details of the attack, according to reports. The ISI’s director-general, Lt. Gen. Shuja Pasha, visited a jailed LeT terrorist after the attacks to get more information, as he had not been fully briefed beforehand, according to Headley.

An ISI spokesperson told The Guardian that Headley’s accusations were “baseless.”

Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik admitted in February that the attacks had been planned in Pakistan.