The Curious Case of Daood Gilani alias David Headley & co

[ramana]

Should make Rehman Malik release those details.

[chetak]

US ready to help India to bring 26/11 perpetrators to justice

Do we still believe such US utterances?

and what do they want in return??

[Falijee]

Rehman Malik for handing over Headley to Pakistan
US citizen claims he worked for ISI
(Posted in Full; read it for what it is worth )

ISLAMABAD - Former interior minister Rehman Malik yesterday asked for handing over David Coleman Headley to Pakistan, saying the American citizen was wanted here for acts of sabotage.
Headley, who allegedly helped survey targets for the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks, told a special Indian court Tuesday that he worked for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The US national, who was sentenced in 2013 by a Chicago court to 35 years in a US prison for his role in the attacks that killed 166 people, also said that ISI provides financial, military and moral support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Hizbul Mujahideen.
While testifying before the Indian court for the second day via video-link from the US, he also claimed that he knew about ISI official Brigadier Riyaz being the handler of LeT Commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, who was key man responsible for the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai.
He alleged the LeT had planned an attack on a conference of Indian defence scientists at Taj Mahal Hotel a year before the 26/11 strikes and had even prepared its dummy. “But the plan was dropped because of logistical reasons, like difficulty in smuggling weapons and personnel and failure to know the schedule of the meet,” he maintained. The 55-year-old, who has turned approver in the case, said prior to November 2007 the targets in Mumbai had not been decided.
Addressing a news conference at his residence in Islamabad, Senator Rehman Malik said Headley was a planted man of India who was wanted in Pakistan for various sabotage acts. “They (US authorities) should hand him over to us and we will see how many confessions he makes. India is playing childish games,” he said.
Senator Malik said the government had kept mum over the uncalled-for allegations by Headley and India’s defiance so he – as the chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior – had to raise a voice.
He said India was using third-degree torture on many detainees to speak against Pakistan. “They (Indians) have been unable to stop their agencies from orchestrating terror acts in Pakistan but expect us to ensure confessions from people of their choice,” he added.
Malik said India should mind its policy as Pakistan was a nuclear power. “They cannot hoodwink us. We are one of the powerful nations of the world. India should play fair,” he remarked.
The former interior minister said India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was supporting terrorism across Pakistan with the blessings of the Indian government.
“They are creating problems for us and ironically blaming us and our agencies of sponsoring terrorism. Our security forces and the government know peace is the best option for us. Our soil is not being used against anybody,” he contended.
Malik said he had sent 48 questions to India when he was the interior minister seeking Headley as he was wanted for terror-links in Pakistan. The questions sought personal and travel details of the alleged terrorist in addition to his meetings with the Indian officials.
Referring to The Nation’s story, Malik said India had refused to accept Pakistani investigators findings on JeM chief Maulana Masood Azhar which indicated India wanted ‘targeted investigations.’ “It is for India to provide evidence against the JeM chief. If they can’t prove their case, we can’t take action against someone who is not involved,” he added. The former interior minister said the Pakistan People’s Party will not tolerate baseless allegations against the army and the ISI by India.
“Our forces are fighting terrorists. They have a clean past and have no links with any terror network,” he said.
On the political front, Malik said he had acted against Uzair Baloch as the interior minister. “He (Baloch) has no links with us. We are the ones who acted against him and wanted to interrogate him,” he explained.
He said the PPP does not support anyone who is involved in terrorism or extremism. “We are targets of terrorism ourselves so we cannot back such people. We want across-the-board action against the terrorist,” he added.
Published in The Nation newspaper on 10-Feb-2016

[vishvak]

Better that Dawood Gilani with US passport aka David Headley stays with
priority 1: Indian cops interrogation
priority 2: USA jail

no priotity: ISI capture, which is opposite of Indian police capturing terrorists from abroad.

[Vayutuvan]

SwamyG, DCH turning approver is a coup for MAD. Hence the outrage.
The belief was that he would be in US custody out of reach of India and the Indian collaborators would be under the carpet.

ramana Ji :

MAD neither in Dictionary nor Glossary. Pls advise.

(PM) Modi Amit (shah) (Ajit) Doval

[Amber G.]

Better that Dawood Gilani with US passport aka David Headley stays with
priority 1: Indian cops interrogation
priority 2: USA jail

no priority:....

First things first, Dawood MUST tell truth and be helpful to Indian prosecutors
If not all bets are off.. he may get death sentence in USA.

One of the condition for plea bargaining in US court to spare his life and get only 35 years sentence was that he will truthfully cooperate with India, in indian court.

His "approver" status also is conditional , so if Indian public prosecutor Nikam finds that he is lying, the court can take the "approver" status back and if he is extradited to India, he can still get worse punishment.

And if Dawood lies, and Indians can prove it to US prosecution's satisfaction that he did not keep his promise, his plea bargain may no longer be valid.. and in theory he may get capital punishment per US law.

This "understanding" between US and India is master stroke, IMO, from Nikam. He ran it by Doval who liked it and NaMo approved it.

Wait and see... in spite of all the insults thrown at GOI or US Govt, I think positive results will be there.

[ramana]

AmberG, I too think its a master stroke by MAD. And its causing heartburn in TSP, Lootyens and #Bhaiwood.

Each will have its own fallout.

I think NaMo will move to get ISI declared terrorist agency by UN.

[member_29325]

If DCH has a competent lawyer, his sentencing will only be for the crimes committed against the US -- don't see why lying in a deposition will have any effect on his sentencing. He clearly has cut some deal with the US govt. for giving this deposition. Not to mention there is no way of telling which of his testimony is lies and which ones aren't.

[ramana]

Please read original plea bargain.
Amber G is right.

[member_29325]

Thanks. I guess I am not interpreting the words "foreign judicial proceedings held in the US means" in page 26 right, since these judicial proceedings of this case are in India and not in the US. But maybe it just means "depositions/testimony given in the US".

"Defendant further agrees that, when directed by US AG, he will fully and truthfully testify in any foreign judicial proceedings held in the US by way of deposition, Video conferencing or letters of rogatory".

[Varoon Shekhar]

Disgusting and repulsive, how large sections of the Western media, are downplaying or ignoring the Headley statements, but giving huge attention to an elephant rampage in a village in West Bengal!

Has anyone else noticed this? Canada based readers, may have seen the large article about the elephant in the Toronto Star, and the obscuring of the Headley story.

[disha]

^^Varoon'ji., David Headley also is showing the complicity of US/Western agencies and US/West. I think US has come to some sense that this 'double agent' thing where it is okay for DH to work with LeT to hurt India's interests in order to protect western interests has gone too far. And if there is a blowback, it will be immense which they cannot explain away to their own citizens.

Hence in their own interests they are letting DH speak but covering it up locally. Since it shows an ugly mirror to all the interference they are doing in other's affairs.

[SSridhar]

Times Now says that DCH has deposed that the ISI wanted to recruit BARC staff. I had not heard this before. We already know that he had recced BARC. In light of this new revelation, we have to find out whether he did it from outside or somehow was able to enter it.

[Prem]

How Pakistan subverts the Indian elite

The ISI’s mandate, as Headley confirmed this week, is to play a dual role in India. Its principal task is to fund terror groups against Indian civilian and military targets. Its parallel role is to build a cabal of Indian opinion-makers who will provide credible alibis for Pakistan after terror attacks by the terrorist groups the ISI has nurtured for decades. Who are these opinion-makers and how are they subverted? In the top tier are journalists and retired army officers. They can be relied upon to defend Pakistan in newspaper columns and television debates. In the second tier lie filmmakers, artistes and writers who constantly seek people-to-people contacts and sporting links with Pakistan - irrespective of its terror strikes on India. In the third tier lurk opposition politicians who are quick to find excuses for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism (“But Pakistan is also a victim of terror”) while criticising the Indian government’s response. In the fourth and final tier dwell former Indian diplomats. They are track-II specialists who eagerly attend peace seminars in Pakistan and return with mellifluous tales of Pakistani hospitality. The ISI nurtures its Indian apologists as generously as it nurtures its terror groups. India’s chattering classes have always been susceptible to Pakistani wiles. In the 1980s they thrilled to pre-satellite TV serials from Pakistan. In the 2000s no international summit in Delhi was complete without a swaggering Pervez Musharraf or supercilious Imran Khan.
The recent controversy over actor Anupam Kher being denied a visa to attend Karachi Literature Festival is a rare example of Pakistan’s slick subversive machinery in India breaking down.
Error Pakistan high commissioner Abdul Basit then made a cardinal error which even the ISI’s Indian apologists could not credibly defend. He denied that Kher had been denied a visa: Kher, he said, simply hadn’t applied for one. Usually though, Pakistan’s strategy of cultivating Trojan Horses in India has worked well. Most card-holding members of the Indian elite come from inconspicuous backgrounds. They have over the years climbed up the social, political and economic ladder, rung by rung. They host networking parties where politicians across the ideological spectrum mix with the rest of Delhi’s nouveaux riches. Pakistani guests are often invited - visiting human rights activists from Karachi, TV anchors from Islamabad, retired army officers from Rawalpindi, and social butterflies from Lahore. The fact that Pakistan has subverted a significant section of India’s opinion-makers reflects poorly on successive Indian governments. During the 10 years of the UPA-I and UPA-II, the atmosphere was especially congenial for the ISI to make deep inroads into the country’s chattering classes. Track-II meetings, aman ki asha seminars and cultural exchanges were the flavour of the decade, rudely interrupted by the 26/11 terror attack. But even that was a temporary setback.
The Modi government’s inconsistent policy on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism has emboldened those in India who continue to speak for Pakistan. Headley’s testimony won’t change that: the subverted rarely reform.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/in ... z3zvff5PGf

[Aditya_V]

Well I have been calling it since mid 2000's, today it is not complicated theory and syndrome for the DIE, it is simple put personal benefits at the cost of the nation. A MSA will have his daughter Grand children in Chicago, He gets them a comfortable life without any real hard work in the USA.

As the Javed Sheikh, 2 Pakis and Ishrat Jehan case shows, the level to which the Judiciary, Media, Politicians within India have been compromised, we have huge termites within our system. These termites will not disappear with a 'Stroke of Pen' as some in BRF think can be removed, if will take a minimum 10-15 year proper rule to remove the compromised people from key nodes in our system.

[SSridhar]

Ujjwal Nikam must closely question DCH on Rahul Bhatt

[SwamyG]

Former Special Director Rajendra Kumar's interview on Times Now is a new Salvo fired at UPA. He blamed politicians for interference with IB and CBI. Devastating hit at the family. Claims 26/11 could have been prevented.

[Peregrine]

SwamyG, DCH turning approver is a coup for MAD. Hence the outrage.
The belief was that he would be in US custody out of reach of India and the Indian collaborators would be under the carpet.

ramana Ji :
MAD neither in Dictionary nor Glossary. Pls advise.

(PM) Modi Amit (shah) (Ajit) Doval

vayu tuvan Ji :

Many Thanks Indeed

Cheers

[rsingh]

How Pakistan subverts the Indian elite

The ISI’s mandate, as Headley confirmed this week, is to play a dual role in India. Its principal task is to fund terror groups against Indian civilian and military targets. Its parallel role is to build a cabal of Indian opinion-makers who will provide credible alibis for Pakistan after terror attacks by the terrorist groups the ISI has nurtured for decades. Who are these opinion-makers and how are they subverted? In the top tier are journalists and retired army officers. They can be relied upon to defend Pakistan in newspaper columns and television debates. In the second tier lie filmmakers, artistes and writers who constantly seek people-to-people contacts and sporting links with Pakistan - irrespective of its terror strikes on India. In the third tier lurk opposition politicians who are quick to find excuses for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism (“But Pakistan is also a victim of terror”) while criticising the Indian government’s response. In the fourth and final tier dwell former Indian diplomats. They are track-II specialists who eagerly attend peace seminars in Pakistan and return with mellifluous tales of Pakistani hospitality. The ISI nurtures its Indian apologists as generously as it nurtures its terror groups. India’s chattering classes have always been susceptible to Pakistani wiles. In the 1980s they thrilled to pre-satellite TV serials from Pakistan. In the 2000s no international summit in Delhi was complete without a swaggering Pervez Musharraf or supercilious Imran Khan.
The recent controversy over actor Anupam Kher being denied a visa to attend Karachi Literature Festival is a rare example of Pakistan’s slick subversive machinery in India breaking down.
Error Pakistan high commissioner Abdul Basit then made a cardinal error which even the ISI’s Indian apologists could not credibly defend. He denied that Kher had been denied a visa: Kher, he said, simply hadn’t applied for one. Usually though, Pakistan’s strategy of cultivating Trojan Horses in India has worked well. Most card-holding members of the Indian elite come from inconspicuous backgrounds. They have over the years climbed up the social, political and economic ladder, rung by rung. They host networking parties where politicians across the ideological spectrum mix with the rest of Delhi’s nouveaux riches. Pakistani guests are often invited - visiting human rights activists from Karachi, TV anchors from Islamabad, retired army officers from Rawalpindi, and social butterflies from Lahore. The fact that Pakistan has subverted a significant section of India’s opinion-makers reflects poorly on successive Indian governments. During the 10 years of the UPA-I and UPA-II, the atmosphere was especially congenial for the ISI to make deep inroads into the country’s chattering classes. Track-II meetings, aman ki asha seminars and cultural exchanges were the flavour of the decade, rudely interrupted by the 26/11 terror attack. But even that was a temporary setback.
The Modi government’s inconsistent policy on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism has emboldened those in India who continue to speak for Pakistan. Headley’s testimony won’t change that: the subverted rarely reform.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/in ... z3zvff5PGf

Look like written by a Brite.

[Raveen]

Former Special Director Rajendra Kumar's interview on Times Now is a new Salvo fired at UPA. He blamed politicians for interference with IB and CBI. Devastating hit at the family. Claims 26/11 could have been prevented.

Do you have a link?

[SwamyG]

x-post. Videos of Rajendra Kumar with Times Now.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/vide ... 963564.cms
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/vide ... 963830.cms

[svenkat]

MK Narayanan on Headleys deposition
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-things-headley-left-unsaid/article8249373.ece?homepage=true

Again, in reply to a leading question from the prosecutor, Headley also identified Ishrat Jahan as a terrorist belonging to the LeT (since her death in a police encounter in Gujarat in 2004, there had been many attempts to portray her as an innocent victim). Intelligence agencies, however, were aware that she was an LeT operative, and a key figure in a carefully planned LeT operation. The operational trail went from Pakistan to Dubai, Kochi, Kashmir and finally Ahmedabad. Headley provided neither names nor any details regarding this operation. His sole reason for identifying Ishrat as an LeT operative, it would seem, was to give a propaganda advantage to the LeT. The most glaring omission in Headley’s deposition was his unwillingness to identify Sayed Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, currently languishing in an Indian prison.

Reading between the lines of his testimony, Headley’s jihadi leanings are obvious. Answering one of Mr. Nikam’s questions, he identifies with jihad and the need to fight against enemies of Islam such as India. His jihadi belief was, no doubt, greatly strengthened during the years he spent in LeT and other training camps in Pakistan, but it would be a mistake to ignore the ‘Afghan effect’. Few international volunteers actually fought in Afghanistan; most worked, or remained, in Pakistan. From these volunteers have emerged several of today’s jihadis. History today is aware that among such elements was a pious young Saudi engineer, Osama bin Laden. Headley’s case is thus very instructive for us. Training camps that programmed Headley are well situated to produce many others to wage jihad against India.

Professor Christopher Andrew, who has written a landmark history of the British domestic counter-intelligence and security agency MI5, coined the term Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder (HASDD) to describe the inability of today’s policymakers and intelligence specialists to situate any significant development within a broader historical context. He was speaking specifically about the world’s response to the emergence of transnational Islamist extremism as a security threat. In effect, what he suggested was that there is a general tendency to lose sight of what has transpired in the past. The Headley interlude is a reminder to us that we, as a nation, should not fall victim to HASDD.

He has avoided mention of the many hidden moles he is certain to have left behind from his several visits to India. Identifying an already known Rahul Bhatt means little. Not an inkling has been given by him about the nature of the terrorist trail from Pakistan to Dubai to Ahmedabad and of the many links in this chain. Headley is significantly silent about the ‘Karachi Project’, by which disaffected Indian Muslims were inveigled into becoming part of the Indian Mujahideen.

An inherent weakness in combating global terror at present is the absence of honest collaboration and cooperation among intelligence agencies the world over. What passes for cooperation today is an over-simplified framework of statements accompanied by limited follow-up actions. India was a victim of this kind of ‘faint-hearted’ cooperation in the case of the 26/11 attacks. The U.S., and to a lesser extent the U.K., had important information with them about a possible attack on Mumbai, having penetrated Zarar Shah’s computer. The U.S. possibly had more additional information via the Headley link, but seemed to play down his involvement with the LeT due to other ‘operational considerations’. The net result was that all the information available was not shared, and what was shared was inadequate to save the lives of over 160 people.

[ramana]

^^^^ Final quote

A final word. Between Headley and former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s admission — that the ISI had been training Jaish-e-Mohammad and LeT militants — the dividing line between state and non-state cadres in Pakistan has been fully erased.

This is what BRF has been screaming since a long time.

[ramana]

Pillai's interview about IB enticing LeT to attack NaMo as covert operation gives very good insight into the DCH affair.

And worse it triggers thoughts about plots beyond plots that went bad.

[Muppalla]

Friends I wrote this article (lot more softened to avoid nuisance of libel suits etc.)

Daood Sayed Gilani (David Headley) – 26/11: Ek Kahani

I belong to a club who were gently called as CTists. However, I think many of those theories seems to be getting unraveled as truth. The last decade (a lost decade) is one that is a true representation of the rulers directly conniving with the enemy and perpetrating the destruction of the nation.

Latest from GK.Pillai that Chidu is the one who removed LeT from the affidavit of Ishrat Jehan should come as shocker to many but it is really no surprise. Let us watch the following CTs and these will unravel if Modi as PM succeeds for next decade. Hoping to see Smriti as PM after Modi.

(1) 26/11 is a operation of Paki terror and government machinery in collusion with UPA government. Actors are Chidu and MKN to orchestrate massive saffron terror to completely annihilate the Sangh and put Modi behind bars.
(2) YSR was killed (not accident) by the nationalist forces to start a process to send the congress party to oblivion
(3) Sunanda Tharoor is a escort girl serving all types of folks of mafia in Dubai. She is in a contract marriage with Shashi Tharoor to facilitate massive money laundering.

[ramana]

X-Posting from India-US relations thread...

Interesting article.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... tin-215007

A key nexus between Trump (through business/real-estate connections) and Putin (via Kremlin political connections) is the Jewish sect of Chabad-Lubavitch.

Why do I post this in the US-India thread?

Because the Chabad house was one of the targets of the LeT terrorists during the 26/11/2008 attack on Mumbai. At that time people speculated it was just a "target of opportunity" (being generally associated with Judaism), but after learning more about this group, one has to wonder if they were deliberately targeted by the ISI.

Fascinating article, read it all onlee...

Putin’s kind of Jews

The Russian state’s embrace of Chabad happened, like many things in Putin’s Russia, as the result of a factional power struggle.

In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.

At the time, Russia already had a chief rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to the title.


The Putin-Chabad alliance has reaped benefits for both sides. Under Putin, anti-Semitism has been officially discouraged, a break from centuries of discrimination and pogroms, and the government has come to embrace a state-sanctioned version of Jewish identity as a welcome part of the nation.

As Putin has consolidated his control of Russia, Lazar has come to be known derisively as “Putin’s rabbi.” He has escorted the Russian leader to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and attended the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics, Putin’s pet project, on the Jewish Sabbath. Putin returned that favor by arranging for Lazar to enter the stadium without submitting to security checks that would have broken the rules for observing Shabbat.

In 2013, a $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow under the auspices of Chabad and with funding from Abramovich. Putin donated a month of his salary to the project, while the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, pitched in by offering relevant documents from its archives.

In 2014, Lazar was the only Jewish leader present at Putin’s triumphal announcement of the annexation of Crimea.

But the rabbi has paid a price for his loyalty to Putin. Since the annexation, his continued support for the Russian autocrat has caused a rift with Chabad leaders in Ukraine. And for years, the Russian government has defied an American court order to turn over a trove of Chabad texts called the “Schneerson Library” to the Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Shortly after the opening of the tolerance museum, Putin ordered the collection transferred there instead. The move made Lazar the custodian of a prized collection that his Brooklyn comrades believe is rightfully theirs.


If Lazar has any qualms about his role in all the intra-Chabad drama, he hasn’t let on publicly. “Challenging the government is not the Jewish way,” the rabbi said in 2015.

Trump, Bayrock, Sapir

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, as Trump looked for business and investors in the former Soviet Union during the first years of this century, he struck up an enduring relationship with a firm called Bayrock-Sapir.

Bayrock was co-led by Felix Sater, a convicted mob associate whose late father has been named in court documents as working for Russian crime don Semion Moglivech, an ally of Putin’s who until recently was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. A lawyer for Sater, Robert Wolf, said Sater’s father never met Mogilevich and that the claims of an association were made falsely by an adverse party as part of litigation that he described as a “multi-year, billon-dollar shakedown of Mr. Sater.”

Sater and another Bayrock employee, Daniel Ridloff, who like Sater later went on to work directly for the Trump Organization, belong to the Port Washington Chabad house. Sater told POLITICO Magazine that in addition to serving on the board of the Port Washington Chabad house, he sits on the boards of numerous Chabad entities in the U.S. and abroad, though none in Russia.

The extent of Sater’s ties to Trump is a matter of some dispute. Working out of Trump Tower, Sater partnered with the celebrity developer on numerous Trump-branded developments and scouted deals for him in the former Soviet Union. In 2006, Sater escorted Trump’s children Ivanka and Don Jr. around Moscow to scour the city for potential projects, and he worked especially closely with Ivanka on the development of Trump SoHo, a hotel and condominium building in Manhattan whose construction was announced on “The Apprentice” in 2006.

In 2007, Sater’s stock fraud conviction became public. The revelation did not deter Trump, who brought him on as “a senior advisor to the Trump Organization” in 2010. In 2011, a number of purchasers of Trump SoHo units sued Trump and his partners for fraud and the New York attorney general’s office opened a criminal inquiry into the building’s marketing. But the purchasers settled and agreed not to cooperate with the criminal investigation, which was subsequently scuttled, according to the New York Times. Two former executives are suing Bayrock alleging tax evasion, money laundering, racketeering, bribery, extortion and fraud.

Under oath, Sater has described a close relationship with the Trumps, while Trump has testified under oath that he barely knew Sater and would not be able to pick his face out in a crowd. Several people who worked closely with Sater during this period and who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation from both men, scoffed at Trump’s testimony, describing frequent meetings and near-constant phone calls between the two. One person recalled numerous occasions on which Trump and Sater dined together, including at the now-defunct Kiss & Fly in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

“Trump called Felix like every other day to his office. So the fact that he’s saying he doesn’t know him, that’s a lot of crap,” said a former Sater colleague. “They were definitely in contact always. They spoke on the phone all the time.”

In 2014, the Port Washington Chabad house named Sater its “man of the year.” At the ceremony honoring Sater, the chabad’s founder, Shalom Paltiel, recounted how Sater would spill his guts to him about his adventures working as a government cooperator on sensitive matters of national security.

“I only recently told Felix I really didn’t believe most of it. I thought perhaps he watched too many James Bond movies, read one too many Tom Clancy novels,” said Paltiel at the ceremony. “Anyone who knows Felix knows he can tell a good story. I simply did not put too much credence to them.”

But Paltiel went on to recount receiving special clearance years later to accompany Sater to a ceremony at the federal building in Manhattan. There, said Paltiel, officials from every American intelligence agency applauded Sater’s secret work and divulged “stuff that was more fantastic, and more unbelievable, than anything he had been telling me.” A video of the event honoring Sater has been removed from the Port Washington Chabad house’s website but is still available on YouTube.

When I contacted Paltiel for this article, he hung up the phone as soon as I introduced myself. I wanted to ask him about some of the connections I’d come across in the course of my reporting. In addition to his relationship with Sater, Paltiel is also close to “Putin’s rabbi” Lazar, calling Lazar “my dear friend and mentor” in a short note about running into him at Schneerson’s gravesite in Queens.

According to Boteach, this is unsurprising, because Chabad is the sort of community where everybody knows everybody else. “In the world of Chabad, we all went to Yeshiva together, we were all ordained together,” Boteach explained. “I knew Berel Lazar from yeshiva.”

The Port Washington Chabad house has another Bayrock tie. Among its top 13 benefactors, its “Chai Circle,” as listed on its website, is Sater’s partner, Bayrock founder Tevfik Arif.

Arif, a former Soviet bureaucrat turned wealthy real estate developer, owns a mansion in Port Washington, an upscale suburb, but he makes a curious patron for the town’s Chabad. A Kazakh-born citizen of Turkey with a Muslim name, Arif is not Jewish, according to people who have worked with him. In 2010, he was arrested in a raid on a yacht in Turkey that once belonged to the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, and charged with running an international underage prostitution ring. Arif was later cleared of the charges.

Before the scandal on Ataturk’s yacht, Arif partnered closely with Trump, Ivanka Trump and Sater in the development of Trump SoHo along with the Sapir family, a New York real estate dynasty and the other half of Bayrock-Sapir.

Its patriarch, the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.

Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.

Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.

Trump attended the bris. A month earlier, in May 2008, he and Leviev had met to discuss possible real estate projects in Moscow, according to a contemporaneous Russian news report. An undated photograph on a Pinterest account called LLD Diamond USA, the name of a firm registered to Leviev, shows Trump and Leviev shaking hands and smiling. (The photograph was first pointed out by Pacific Standard.)

That same year, Sapir, an active Chabad donor in his own right, joined Leviev in Berlin to tour Chabad institutions in the city.

Jared, Ivanka, Roman, Dasha

Also present at the Sapir-Rosen bris was Kushner, who along with his now-wife Ivanka Trump has forged his own set of ties to Putin’s Chabad allies. Kushner’s family, which is Modern Orthodox, has long been highly engaged in philanthropy across the Jewish world, including to Chabad entities, and during his undergraduate years at Harvard, Kushner was active in the university’s Chabad house. Three days before the presidential election, the couple visited Schneerson’s grave and prayed for Trump. In January, the couple purchased a home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood and settled on the city’s nearby Chabad synagogue, known as TheSHUL of the Nation's Capital, as their house of worship.

In May 2015, a month before Trump officially entered the Republican presidential primary, Kushner bought a majority stake in the old New York Times building on West 43rd Street from Leviev for $295 million.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump are also close with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova. Abramovich, an industrialist worth more than $7 billion and the owner of the British soccer club Chelsea FC, is the former governor of the Russian province of Chukotka, where he is still revered as a hero. He owes his fortune to his triumphant emergence from Russia’s post-Soviet “aluminum wars,” in which more than 100 people are estimated to have died in fighting over control of aluminum refineries. Abramovich admitted in 2008 that he amassed his assets by paying billions of dollars in bribes. In 2011, his former business partner, the late Boris Berezovsky—an oligarch who had fallen out with Putin and gone on to live in exile at the Trump International on Central Park West—accused him of threats, blackmail and intimidation in a lawsuit in the United Kingdom, which Abramovich won.

Abramovich was reportedly the first person to recommend to Yeltsin that he choose Putin as his successor. In their 2004 biography of Abramovich, the British journalists Chris Hutchins and Dominic Midgely write, “When Putin needed a shadowy force to act against his enemies behind the scenes, it was Abramovich whom he could rely on to prove a willing co-conspirator.” The biographers compare the two men’s relationship to that between a father and a son and report that Abramovich personally interviewed candidates for Putin’s first cabinet. He has reportedly gifted Putin a $30 million yacht, though Putin denies it.

Abramovich’s vast business holdings and his personal life overlap with Trump’s world in multiple ways.

According to a 2012 report from researchers at Cornell University, Evraz, a firm partly owned by Abramovich, has contracts to provide 40 percent of the steel for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project whose completion was approved by Trump in March after years of delay. And in 2006, Abramovich purchased a large stake in the Russian oil giant Rosneft, a company now being scrutinized for its possible role in alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. Both Trump and the Kremlin have dismissed as "fake news" a dossier that alleges that a recent sale of Rosneft shares was part of a scheme to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia.

Meanwhile, his wife, Zhukova, has long traveled in the same social circles as Kushner and Ivanka Trump: She is a friend and business partner of Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng, one of Ivanka’s closest friends, and a friend of Karlie Kloss, the longtime girlfriend of Kushner’s brother, Josh.

Over the years, Zhukova has grown close to Jared and Ivanka themselves. In February 2014, a month before Putin illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, Ivanka Trump posted a photo to Instagram of herself with Zhukova, Wendi Deng, a bottle of wine, and the caption, “Thank you [Zhukova] for an unforgettable four days in Russia!” Deng was recently rumored to be dating Putin, though she denied it. Other photos from the trip show Kushner was also present in Russia at the time.

Last summer, Kushner and Ivanka Trump shared a box at the U.S. Open with Zhukova and Deng. In January, Zhukova reportedly attended Trump’s inauguration as Ivanka Trump’s guest.

On March 14, The Daily Mail spotted Josh Kushner dining with Zhukova in New York. According to the outlet, Josh Kushner “hid his face as he exited the eatery with Dasha.”

A week later, at the same time Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were vacationing in Aspen with her two brothers and their families, Abramovich’s plane flew from Moscow to Denver, according to a flight tracking service. Abramovich owns two properties in the Aspen area.

A spokesman for Abramovich declined to comment on the record about the Colorado overlap. The White House referred queries about the couples to a personal spokeswoman for Ivanka Trump. The spokeswoman, Risa Heller, initially indicated she would provide answers to questions about the Colorado overlap and recent contacts between the couples, but did not do so.

President Trump has reportedly sought security clearances for Kushner and Ivanka, who have taken on growing roles in his White House. For anyone else, a close personal relationship with the family of a top Putin confidant would present significant hurdles to obtaining security clearances, former high-ranking intelligence officials said, but political pressure to grant clearances to the president’s children would be likely to override any security concerns.

“Yes, such connections to Russia should matter for a clearance,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA Moscow station chief. “Question is, will they?”

“I don’t think the Trump family camp will have any trouble with security clearances, as long as there’s no polygraph involved,” said Milt Bearden, former chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division. “It’s absolutely crazy, but not going to be an issue.”
...

So what this article conveys is Putin and Chabad House leader Lazar very close relation ship since 1999.
Putin is out of power in 2008 due to term limits.
US Chabad House has differences with the Russian Chabad House over custody of artifacts.
Meantime DCh gang identifies Chabad House the only religious structure in the 26/11 Mumbai attack.

Was Chabad House and original ISI target or chosen by DCH

Either case why was Chabad house chosen as a target by the terrorists?

[ramana]

The Sri Lanka Easter Sunday attacks in April 2019 looks like have links back to this thread...

viewtopic.php?p=2350210#p2350210

First:

IANS reports of a terror network aimed at India created by Jihadis acting out of Paki High Commission in Colombo related to which a major terror plot targeting India was recently busted by NIA. It also details how Paki jihadis established themselves amongst SL muslims since past 14 years (post Tsunami) creating sleeper cells & fanning Islamic Jihad . This is the underlying basis for the steady flow of ISIS recruits from the Maldives,SL & to some degree TN&KL region .
The recent SL bomb blasts is a culmination of this process.

Terror Trail-I: Lashkar's grand plot in Lanka, B'desh & Maldives (IANS Exclusive)
IANS | New Delhi
Last Updated at May 7, 2019 08:15 IST

India's deep state is well versed in the art of intelligence warfare. Its human intelligence-led inputs to the Sri Lankan establishment, though unutilised, showed that they were on top of their game. India has been tracking the National Thowheed Jamaat (NTJ) for sometime now. New Delhi moved with great alacrity passing on direct actionable intelligence in the weeks and days leading up to the Easter Sunday bombings. And this happened from material accessed during interrogations of an ISIS suspect arrested in India.

The Sri Lankan government even had a warning that Catholic churches were among the possible targets. The suspect gave Indian investigators the name of a man - Zahran Hashmi - he had trained, who is associated with a Sri Lankan extremist group implicated in the bombings. The shadowy man, Zahran Hashim, was identified in a video of the purported attackers released by ISIS, which claimed responsibility for the Easter Sunday macabre massacre.

IANS met several top intelligence functionaries to piece together the emergence of Sri Lanka as the new terror central. While doing so, it unearthed a gargantuan and deep-seated Lashkar plot which goes back at least 14 years showing how LeT had invested for years in Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives and even Malaysia as part of a larger encirclement strategy of India.

Indian intelligence has been alive to this and has used all its skill sets and ground-level inputs to mitigate the terror threat emanating from the island and other neighbouring countries. It needs to be established here that ISI C Wing and LeT are two sides of the same coin as far as jihad is concerned.

ISI has been using Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq (IKK) as a proxy to radicalise unemployed Muslim youth in Sri Lanka and coax them to join the NTJ. In parallel, India has bolstered its security apparatus in Tamil Nadu and Kerala due to the strong presence of NTJ members in these states.

The rise of IS and its vile and noxious thought process of establishing a Caliphate has found takers in Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives. At least 200-250 Maldivians have reportedly fought for the IS in trouble spots like Syria and these are mules who make the trek to Yemen where they are further indoctrinated and trained, then sent on wars sometimes to Mali and Chad for fighting or to the combat zone in Iraq and Syria to fight under the IS flag.

A Tokyo-based online magazine 'The Diplomat' validated this saying a December 2015 report by the Soufan Group, a private intelligence agency run by former FBI agent-turned contractor Ali Soufan, put out a count of foreign fighters who'd volunteered to fight for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Four South Asian countries featured in that list - Malaysia, Pakistan, India, and the Maldives - sending an estimated 393 fighters among them. It was the island nation in the Indian Ocean that sent analysts and headlines into a tizzy with the rise of radical Islam with its bent towards Salafist tendencies. It had by far the highest per capita fighters in the sandbox.

The Indian deep state has been following Islamic militancy in Sri Lanka, a fertile breeding ground since 2004. The tipping point in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the emerald isle has Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)'s hand prints all over it. A special group headed by LeT's Muzzamil Bhat from Sialkot and his lackeys made forays into Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka between 2005 and 2007, knowing fully well that these areas could be used to further their agenda and to encircle India.

Muzzamil Bhat is one of the planners of 26/11 and is reported to be the architect of the Chittisinghpora massacre. The entire construct of this plan to use these countries as a launchpad to train terrorists was part of his larger architecture.

The FBI in its 26/11 chargesheet named Bhat as D, a key LeT military commander, who was involved in the Chittisinghpora massacre in Jammu and Kashmir on the eve of President Bill Clinton's visit to India in March 2000.

In its second chargesheet, filed in a Chicago court, the FBI named an ISI officer, Major Iqbal, and four LeT operatives - Sajid Majeed, Abu Qahafa, Abu Alqama and the unknown Lashkar member 'D'. About 'D' the chargesheet states that after the arrest of Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi in Pakistan in connection with the 26/11 attacks, he became the overall operational commander of LeT.

According to FBI, 'D', who is yet to be arrested by Pakistan, was a handler of David Coleman Headley. Headley told Indian investigators that Muzzamil was involved in the Chittisinghpora massacre. In turn, Headley also said Muzzamil was most trustworthy lieutenant of Lakhvi and apart from Chittisinghpora killings of Sikhs, he planned the Akshardham temple attack in September 2002.

According to Indian security establishment sources, Muzzamil is a Kashmiri born in 1976. He is married and his family lives in the Gujranwala town of Pakistani Punjab.

Bhat, on the other hand, is a planner and his understanding was that with Indian intelligence and security forces keeping a close vigil on southern India in those years, he reckoned that taking the training camps offshore would be a better idea. SIMI was already active in southern India, they had set up a southern chapter across the four states, while Bhatkal had become a new centrifuge.

Terror central was moving from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra to the southern part of India. Hence Muzzamil arrived in Sri Lanka to test the waters and quickly realised that there was traction amongst Tamil Muslims after the Tsunami, ditto in Bangladesh among the Rohingyas between 2004-2008.

But RAW which was extremely active in both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka did not allow Bhat or his henchmen to stabilise their operations.

In 2011, ably abetted and assisted by ISI officer Amir Zubair Siddiqui (Counselor in the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo), a new name popped up on the radar - Zakir Hussain - who began to actively consort with and recruit Tamil Muslims on the island. The plan was to recruit them and unleash hell on diplomatic missions in Chennai and Bangalore, but RAW once again found the scent and pursued them to cut off their feed stock of financing, explosives and weapons.

India engaged with Colombo and brought it up to speed on Siddiqui's shenanigans who was then packed off from Sri Lanka. The diplomat Amir Zubair Siddiqui's plot was to attack the US Consulate in Chennai, Israeli Consulate in Bengaluru, Eastern Naval Command HQ in Visakhapatnam and ports across the country.

Once RAW had blown his cover, NIA moved in to chargesheet Siddiqui who was then visa counselor at the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo. Siddiqui was arrested for allegedly conspiring to attack vital establishments in India and was quietly withdrawn even before the NIA's request under Mutual Assistance Legal Treaty (MLAT) reached Colombo.

The terror plot was uncovered after the NIA police personnel arrested an ISI agent Mohammed Zakir Hussain (37) through the 'Q' Branch of the Tamil Nadu police in 2013. The reason was that he was gathering details about vital installations in Tamil Nadu and sent photographs to Siddiqui. Hussain used his counterparts Sivabalan and Mohammad Salim to circulate fake currency in the state.

During questioning, Hussain also confessed that he had also used Rafeeque (29) to pump in fake Indian currency in the state.

A much larger network of Maldivians, Sri Lankan Muslims and Malaysian Tamils was discovered through this overarching probe. The hunters caught up with the quarry - Zakir Hussain - and another lynchpin was caught in Malaysia and the cartel was busted. Muzzamil Bhat was the spider who spun the web across the three countries and began the process of indoctrination in Sri Lanka. His tireless efforts paid dividends for he planted the seeds as far back as the mid 2000s. He was the first to connect the dots between Thowheed Jamaat which proselytises (mainly among the Tamil community), fights for "pure Islam" and actively promotes construction of mosques in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lankan Tamil Muslim areas.
(To be continued)
--IANS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F3vZkPi2Mw

Second:

So has connections to the David Headley case too.

Even though the article headline is LeT the case has ISI palm prints all over

I know IANS is US NRI owned and hence the fiction of LeT is there.

I think India should seek extradition of David Headley if there is any link shows up as his pleas bargain was about 26/11 and any new information would make it null and void.
The fact that Sri Lanka has been on the boil since 2004 means he could have linkages.

[SSridhar]

The Waqar ul-Hassan case has all ingredients of another Headley. He has just been arrested returning to the US from Pakistan. Details here.