Headley vowed to retaliate against India: Report

Pakistani-origin US national David Coleman Headley, nabbed by FBI on charges of plotting terror attacks on Indian facilities, had vowed to "retaliate against India" in one of his e-mail messages intercepted by investigators.

"We will retaliate against India," 49-year-old Headley wrote in the message, The New York Times reported on Sunday.

Featuring the growth of Headley from his birth till being arrested by the FBI last month along with his school-time friend Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a US-based Pakistan-born Canadian national, the daily said the indictment against him portrays a man who moved easily between different worlds.

"The profile that has emerged of him since his arrest, however, suggests that Mr Headley felt pulled between two cultures and ultimately gravitated toward an extremist Islamic one," the newspaper said.

"Some of us are saying that 'terrorism' is the weapon of the cowardly," Headley wrote in an e-mail message to his high school classmates last February. "I will say that you may call it barbaric or immoral or cruel, but never cowardly."

He further said "courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim nation."

His e-mail messages, including many that defended beheadings and suicide bombings as heroic, are among the evidence in the government's case against him and his co-conspirator, 48-year-old Rana, who runs businesses in Chicago, the daily said.

n recent days, the mainstream American media has written about the case of Rana-Headley; as to how US nationals and those living here are increasingly becoming indoctrinated by Islamic fundamentalism and planning terrorist attacks in countries like India and Denmark.

The news reports also emphasise on the direct connection between such individuals and terror organisations based in Pakistan, which the Obama Administration considers as a key ally in the fight against terrorism.

"Mr Headley, 49, and Mr Rana, 48, stand out from the young, poor extremists from fundamentalist Islamic schools who strike targets in or close to their homelands. Instead, their privileged backgrounds, extensive travel and bouts of culture shock make them more like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the September 11 attacks, who attended college in the United States, and Mohammed Atta, one of the lead hijackers," The New York Times said.

Headley, the news report said was born to a Pakistani diplomat father and an American mother, who in later years ran a successful bar 'Khyber Pass' in Philadelphia.

The daily said e-mail messages show, that Headley stayed in regular contact with classmates from the military high school he attended in Pakistan, often engaging in impassioned debates about politics and Islam.

Earlier this year, he complained about "NATO criminal vermin dropping 22,000 lbs bombs on unsuspecting, unarmed Afghan villagers" or "napalming southeast Asian farmers."

In an e-mail message defending the beheading of a Polish engineer by the Taliban in Pakistan, he wrote, "the best way for a man to die is with the sword."