A former Philadelphia nightclub manager conducted extensive surveillance on potential targets in the Indian city of Mumbai before the terrorist attacks there in November 2008 that left 166 people dead, federal authorities in Chicago charged yesterday.
Prosecutors said that David Coleman Headley, who already has been charged with planning an attack on a Danish newspaper after it ran cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, made five extended trips to Mumbai from September 2006 through July 2008, taking pictures of various targets.
Headley is known locally from his brief stint here during the 1980s as manager of the popular rock club in Old City, the Khyber Pass.
But in recent years, he allegedly scouted hotels such as the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi, the Leopold Cafe, a Jewish center known as Nariman House and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus train station - each of which was attacked with guns, grenades and other explosives.
Headley was charged in U.S. District Court yesterday with 12 counts, including six counts of conspiracy to bomb public places in India, to murder and maim individuals in India and Denmark and other offenses.
He could be sentenced to death if convicted on the charges involving the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Headley's attorney, John T. Theis, said that he would "continue to look at this and see what the evidence is," but declined to comment further.
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20091208_Former_Phila__nightclub_manager_charged_in_Mumbai_massacre.html