Witness Says ISI Suggested Mumbai Chabad House as Additional Target
An officer in Pakistan’s intelligence service chose a Jewish center as a target for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and then helped launch a new plot against Denmark, the star witness in a terrorism trial in Chicago said Tuesday.
In his second day of testimony, David Coleman Headley, a confessed Pakistani American terrorist, revealed more details about close ties between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and Lashkar-i-Taiba, the group accused of carrying out the attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans.
Headley said his ISI handler, a man known only as Major Iqbal, deployed him on the last of five reconnaissance missions to scout targets that included the Chabad House, a Jewish community center where gunmen later killed three American rabbis.
“Major Iqbal told me the Chabad House would be added on whatever list [of targets] there was because it was a front office for the Mossad,” Israel’s intelligence agency, Headley said. He added that Iqbal “seemed upset the [Mumbai] airport was not included” as a target.
Nothing suggests that the claim about the Mossad was true.