HEADLEY AND I

  I was in full form, unloading all the information stuffed in my head. My only thought was to somehow convince these men in the room that there were a million things about David Headley that, in retrospect, didn’t add up and which would lead any logical, rational man to believe that he was much more than he seemed, perhaps even a sophisticated agent.

  I told Singh that Headley had once told me that he knew Ayub Afridi. ‘I had never heard of this man at all!’ I said. ‘But Headley told me that Ayub Afridi was a hot-shot drug lord, the Pablo Escobar of Pakistan. And he told me that he knew him personally. What else would you make of him, Mr Singh?’

  I paused for breath, and wondered if I should go on. Singh gestured to me to continue.

  I told them about the weapons bazaar that Headley had once spoken about. He had said, while talking about Afridi, that there was such a bazaar in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one could get Uzi submachine guns cloned in Iran. Imagine! Not only did the man know what Iran was making and that such guns were being cloned, he even knew where they were making them and where they were being sold.

  Headley also told me that heroin was openly sold in Pakistan and that he had some very good contacts in the drug mafia there. According to him, the entire drug belt in the Pashtun area of Pakistan was run by the heroin mafia. He once told me an anecdote about the manufacture of heroin there, which I thought I would share with Singh.

  According to Headley, one of the sure-shot and most commonly adopted ways of manufacturing heroin undetected was to do it in a moving vehicle. If the vehicle is constantly on the move, it’s virtually impossible to track it. So, they would carry out the entire process in a moving Toyota station wagon. The workers would climb in with all the raw materials, and the vehicle would start moving towards the drop-off point for the drugs. Along the way, the raw materials would be processed and converted into the heroin that was sold internationally. Headley said that all this was being done openly in Pakistan.

  When I paused at this juncture, Singh looked at me sharply and said, ‘Is there anything else that you remember, Rahul?’

  ‘Yes. Headley said that he knew Mullah Naseem Akhundzade.’

  ‘Who?’

  I told him that I too had had trouble remembering the name, but had come up with a simple solution. ‘Haramzade, Mr Singh, Haramzade!’ I said.

  At least, that’s how I remembered the name. This man, Headley had told me, was an Afghan warlord. And without his knowledge and consent, nobody could manufacture, move or sell either drugs or weapons.

  ‘So tell me, Mr Singh, do you blame me for thinking that Headley was an agent?’ I asked. He didn’t reply.

  I felt exhausted, but I knew that the interrogation was not over yet. The men in the room kept asking me the same questions and I repeated everything I had said, word for word, without missing out the smallest detail. Finally, after four hours or so, when all of us were spent, we took a break.

  In between, they had mentioned Vilas to me, and told me that he too was being questioned and that I should be truthful, especially if I had nothing to hide, since they would compare Vilas’s statement with mine and check for any discrepancies. I later heard that Vilas had had a rough time during his interrogation, and had to endure a lot of mockery and humiliation. They kept ridiculing him for being a bodybuilder, and made him take off his shirt and pose bare-bodied.

  The questioning resumed after the break, and I again repeated all that I had said before and they checked for discrepancies. They didn’t find any. This time, however, they were more aggressive. For example, one seemingly innocuous question that they fired at me was actually a highly loaded one, and contained a thinly veiled threat.

  ‘If you are telling the truth, Rahul, and if you were not involved with Headley and his terror mission, how can you explain the 240-plus phone calls that you made to him?’ Singh asked me.

  This was again a question with a perfectly reasonable answer, and I gave it to them.

  ‘Sir, I have already told you that we were in close contact with each other, and kept in touch pretty much all the time. Isn’t it natural that you spend a lot of time talking to a person you are close to?’ I said. I added that Headley was taking steroids under my supervision, which made me responsible for his health. I had to keep a tab on his well-being.

  Then came another question, which seemed to contain a veiled threat. ‘How did you know about both his phones? Why did he give you both numbers?’

  I again reminded my interrogators that Headley and I were friends at the time. It was quite natural for him to give me both his numbers just in case I had to call him and one of them was unreachable. ‘He gave me both his numbers and I saved them without thinking twice,’ I said. ‘Why would I be suspicious?’

  Finally, the seemingly never-ending interrogation came to an end after seven long hours, and we left the Police Officers’ Mess at around 11.30 at night.

  I was summoned again after two days and taken to the same room where I had been interrogated earlier, but the men in it this time were different. It was S.P. Pani of the NIA, an officer of the rank of superintendent of police, who questioned me. Pani later became the investigating officer of the 26/11 attacks and the Headley probe. There were three other south Indian officers in the room, but I could catch only two of the names—Radhakrishnan and Vijayan.

  The men surrounded me as I sat down. They were obviously trying to intimidate me into making a blunder or an error or perhaps saying something that would not tally with my earlier statements. They were probably expecting that I would break down and confess to my involvement in the 26/11 attacks.

  They changed their tactic of interrogation and adopted another line, which I found extremely cryptic and irritating.

  ‘Mr Bhatt, you’re so patriotic!’

  They kept repeating this throughout the interrogation, until at one point, it became banal. Once, I even stopped and said, ‘Yes, I am a patriot. Do you doubt my patriotism and my love for my country?’

  They didn’t give me a direct answer to this, nor did they relent.

  This time, the interrogation was not as extensive as before, and I was allowed to leave after three hours. This time, too, they kept Vilas away from me and interrogated him in a separate room. I think the idea was to get one of us to break down and confess, but neither of us did, for the very simple reason that there was nothing for us to confess to.

  We were called again after two days to give statements. This time it was only Pani who took down my statement. There were none of the theatrics of the two earlier interrogations, and Vilas later told me that he too had been treated better.

  Two days later, we were called in again and made to record our statements one more time. So, in effect, I was made to give my statement four times. Each time, they asked me if I was hiding something, but I had only one answer to give, a resounding, convincing no! By that time, I was feeling as if I had spent more time with the NIA and in that interrogation room than I had spent with Headley. In fact, I later found out that they spent more time with me than the NIA team had spent with Headley when they went to Chicago.

  But it seemed that the NIA was still not satisfied. Sometime in January 2010, they called me for interrogation again, this time to Delhi, where I gave my statement and was grilled for the fifth time. The NIA’s Delhi office is located in the Jasola area, near the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, on the fourth floor of the Splendour shopping mall. I found this rather weird. How could a premier investigation agency like the NIA have its office inside a shopping mall?

  This time, though, it was different. The questions asked were far more cursory than before, almost as if they didn’t expect my answers to be any different. Then they took me to another room where they made me listen to some intercepts of phone calls that they had acquired and asked me if I could identify the person speaking and if it was David Headley. But it wasn’t, and I told them so.

  My interrogation by Crime Branch chief Rakesh Maria and officers of the NIA and the IB was both ex
hausting and unnerving. To answer the same set of questions repeatedly for hours on end was psychologically devastating. After going through those strenuous rounds of questioning, I felt as though I was in a trance. My mother used to tell me that I was behaving like a zombie. And she wasn’t wrong.

  NINE

  After a couple of days of interrogating David Headley, Behera thought he had more or less figured him out. He knew that Headley would tell him much of what he knew and had done, primarily because he had a boastful streak in him. All Behera had to do was egg him on. So far, the strategy was working beautifully.

  ‘Tell me about your training, Mr Headley,’ Behera said. ‘You clearly had a lot of training with Lashkar-e-Taiba, and they must have trusted you a lot.’

  Headley beamed. ‘Yeah, they trusted me.’

  ‘So what kind of training did you get exactly?’

  After the first two preliminary stages—the Daura-e-Amma and Daura-e-Sufa—I progressed to the next. The training became much more practical, and I learned to translate my acceptance and belief in Salafi Islam and radical ideology into action.

  In April 2003, I volunteered for the Daura-e-Khaassa in Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. There were thirty or forty of us in the group that underwent the Daura-e-Khaassa training, which lasted for a full three months. During that time, we were taught the importance of being soldiers of Islam and how jehad should be the raison d’être for all Muslims.

  At first, it was a little difficult for some of us to accept that we would now have to do more than just believe in Islam, that we would have to act in the name of Islam and jehad. But the one thing that some individuals in the group had trouble dealing with was the bloodshed. They kept asking themselves, and each other, and our masters and trainers and teachers, if it was acceptable to kill human beings, and if so, why.

  This was what Daura-e-Khaassa was all about. The earlier Dauras were orientation programmes, this was the real induction into jehad. We were told that it was not just okay to kill others, it was actually an act of worship—it needed to be done to avenge the wrongdoings against Muslims. The LeT established this primarily by showing us very gory and violent movies about atrocities against Muslims.

  We were shown one film after the other during those three months. One of those movies that I still remember vividly was the one on Babu Bajrangi and atrocities in Gujarat.

  I had heard that Babu Bajrangi was a Hindu radical, belonging to the Gujarat wing of the Bajrang Dal. He was involved in killing innocent Muslims in Gujarat; he had been caught on a hidden camera saying that he didn’t mind if he was hanged, but before he was, he wanted to be given a couple of days so he could go and kill as many Muslims as he could. Despite overwhelming evidence, the Gujarat state and the Indian government did not act against him.

  My blood boiled as I watched the movie showing all the inhuman atrocities inflicted upon Muslims in vivid detail. They had been innocent, and had been killed without any reason, in the most brutal manner possible. My hatred for and rage at India increased manifold during those three months.

  We kept thinking how helpless we all were. There we were, with the wherewithal to kill this murderer, this maniac Babu Bajrangi and all others like him, but we were not doing anything at all.

  We were also shown some of the innumerable inflammatory speeches made by the Maharashtrian goondas of the Shiv Sena and their supremo Bal Thackeray. Hafiz Saeed was the one who showed us the damage that Bal Thackeray had done to the Muslim ummah. We hated the man, and watching the videos of his speeches left us feeling angry and with murder on our minds. We realized that there were so many people in India who wanted to keep Muslims underfoot, and who wouldn’t mind wiping out every single Muslim from the face of the earth. And we kept watching those movies.

  I know now that they were shown to us primarily to motivate us, and reassure us that there was no harm in taking up a mission in the name of jehad and Islam, and killing non-Muslims in India. And after everything that we saw on those videos, all our reservations were washed away, and we were fuelled by an unnatural, powerful rage. As it is, I had nursed a hatred against India ever since I was a child and my school had been bombed, but now, my loathing and animosity towards it were reinforced and with good reason.

  Finally, after graduating from the Daura-e-Khaassa, we were taken to a mountain in Muzaffarabad. It was far removed from the hustle and bustle of the town, and very secluded. At first, I thought the next part of our training would be in a cave, as it looked like that was where we were headed. However, although it looked like a cave from outside, we soon found out that it was much more. It was a self-sustained branch of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The sheer grandeur of the place took my breath away—it appeared to be more like a palatial fortress than anything else.

  It was a safe house, and it was called Bait-ul Mujahideen, meaning the ‘house of the crusaders’. Whenever mujahideens would cross over from India’s Jammu and Kashmir or from Pakistan, they would be stationed here and taken care of. Here, they lived a life of luxury until they were ready to leave, or were given details of their next mission. They would then cross the border to India.

  There were close to forty people in our group. There were several non-Pakistanis, including a British national and a man from New Zealand. There were different camps for these foreigners, where the usual regimen of namaz was not followed. But they were allowed to pray if they wanted to.

  I also met a frogman while I was in Muzaffarabad; he was introduced to me as Abdur Rehman. He seemed to be from the Pakistan Navy.

  In that Lashkar camp, Bait-ul Mujahideen, we received intensive all-round training. The emphasis was primarily on urban warfare, and we were trained in two-man, body-attack operations. We learned to cover our partners and work with them seamlessly. We were taught all kinds of urban warfare skills—two-man entry, two-man firing from cover, and covering jams and reloads. We also had situational training—stair work, hall work, combat, first aid, and even unarmed hand-to-hand combat.

  We were taught to shoot with all kinds of weapons—pistols, rifles, shotguns, everything. I handled the M-16, Heckler and Koch, FNAR rifles, Steyr AUG, submachine guns and even a Dragunov sniper rifle. I was also taught how to use hand grenades and anti-personnel fragmentation grenades. But the one weapon that all of us had to master was the AK-47 and its derivatives.

  I learned mainly three types of shooting. The most important was rapid-response firing, which is the most helpful in ambushes. We were also taught low-light or night shooting, and the standard fifteen-metre shot.

  I mentioned the name of Abu Kahafa earlier. He was present at the safe house. He is one of the fattest fellows I’ve ever seen. But appearances are deceptive, as I soon found out. Despite his obesity, he was extremely fit, as strong as a bull, and had amazingly sharp reflexes. In fact, I think he was quicker than many martial arts experts. I had thought of him as just another guy in the crowd during my initial training, but I soon found out that he often masqueraded thus to spot potential candidates for recruitment.

  Kahafa also trained us in unarmed combat. I went through various modes of combat with him, including hand to hand and using knives. Apart from him, there were several others who gave us weapons training, and they were all from the ISI, Pakistan’s Special Security Guard, or the counter-terrorism unit of the Pakistan Army, the Zarar Company. But their identities were never revealed to us at any point of time.

  We went through another Daura, called Daura-e-Ribat, meaning communication. This is a derivative of the root word rabt, meaning connect. Another important skill we had to learn was counter-interrogation techniques. We had to keep our minds in perfect shape in all kinds of situations so that if we were ever captured alive, we would be able to deflect the attention of our interrogators, and confuse and mislead them.

  There was also a strict fitness regime that we had to stick to. Every day, we had to run five kilometres, do twenty pull-ups, thirty dips and forty push-ups, along with abdominal workouts. It was e
ssential to be physically fit, to handle the different kinds of guns. In fact, I was also taught to handle a shotgun and an RPG, a rocket launcher. These are heavy weapons, so to carry them on the shoulder and fire them required us to be at the peak of our fitness, as well as strength.

  They refused to teach me how to assemble bombs. I requested my Lashkar masters and the other trainers, but they were firm about it. So I did not get any training on assembly of explosive devices.

  After many months of intensive training, our Lashkar masters took us to a place called Bay’at ul Rizwan, which refers to an incident that took place during the time of Prophet Muhammed. The new Muslims of that time had sworn allegiance to the Prophet under a tree. It is said that whoever makes this gesture of pledging allegiance to Prophet Muhammed will go to heaven. That is why it is called Bay’at ul Rizwan, meaning ‘the allegiance to heaven’.

  My Salafi masters said that this was a solemn moment, and that we would have to take a momentous decision that would change our lives forever. He said that paying this fealty meant taking an oath of allegiance. We would always remain loyal to jehadi ideology and support it, and never, on any account, betray the cause of jehad. That was what Bay’at meant. But there was no hesitation in any of us. All of us took the Bay’at and swore our loyalty to jehad.

  By now, we looked like soldiers. We had become hardened jehadis, and were fully committed to the cause. Because of our extensive training, we had also acquired confidence in ourselves, and it showed on our faces, in our gait, the way we held ourselves, the way we talked, and in a million other ways. We were now armed and ready to strike mercilessly at the behest of our masters.

  My appearance too had changed completely by this time. Not only did I not have any excess fat, I was wearing only Pathani suits and had grown a long, flowing beard, which made me look like a member of the Taliban.