FBI had a second warning over key Mumbai plotter

Washington:  Less than a year before the November 2008 Mumbai terror mayhem, a second wife of David Coleman Headley warned US officials in Pakistan that she believed her husband was plotting an attack, but she appeared not to have been taken seriously, the New York Times said.

Headley, 50, according to the paper, was a longtime informer in Pakistan for the US Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the US allowed him to move easily in both worlds.

Headley's wife, a young Moroccan woman, had also told US officials that her husband was passionately anti-Indian yet travelled to India all the time.

The new revelation came a day after a report that an American woman who was also married to Headley told federal investigators in New York in 2005 that she believed he was a member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), created and sponsored by Pakistan's powerful spy agency.

Despite the warnings by two of his three wives, Headley roamed far and wide on the LeT's behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving training in small-calibre weapons and counter-surveillance, scouting targets for attacks, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan's lawless northwest, the Times said.

An examination of Headley's movements in the years before the November 2008 Mumbai attack, based on interviews in Washington, Pakistan, India and Morocco, shows that he had overlapping, even baffling, contacts among seemingly disparate groups — Pakistani intelligence, terrorists, and American drug investigators, the Times said.

Boasting

The investigative news organisation ProPublica reported on Saturday that Headley's American former wife told the authorities that Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with LeT.

The Times said, Headley's Moroccan wife, Faiza Outalha, claimed she even showed the US embassy officials a photo of Headley and herself in the Taj Mahal Hotel, where they stayed twice in April and May 2007. Hotel records confirm their stay.

Outalha, 27, said she told American officials that Headley assumed different identities: as a devout Muslim who went by the name Daood when he was in Pakistan, and as an American playboy named David when he was in India.