The Fairfax prosecutor who sent a South Asian religious extremist to death row for killing a pair of US government intelligence officers in broad daylight in 1993 has long contended the killer had no ties to terrorist cells scattered across the country. Now, the law enforcement official thinks he was wrong, and believes that the perpetrator, Mir Aimal Kasi, may not have acted alone.
Kasi, a Pakistani, was found guilty in a Virginia court of shooting to death two employees of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as they waited at a traffic light just outside the main entrance of the spy agency. Robert F. Horan, the Virginia Commonwealth Attorney who prosecuted Kasi, began having second thoughts about the case when the pre-trial evidence he had assembled more than four years ago formed links with information developed in recent week by federal investigators looking into the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks on the Pentagon and New York’s World Trade Center.
Horan saw a connection between the two cases when he read that federal and international investigators had zeroed in on Hamburg, Germany, and arrested three suspected terrorists who were part of a cell dedicated to the “spectacular destruction” of key American buildings.
Horan admits that, at the time, he found the information “interesting,” but says it do not prove that Kasi was linked to a terrorist network, which may have helped him plan the killings.
Now, however, Horan says that if he known four years ago that “there are cells operating in at least one part of Germany, we may have handled the investigation differently.”
Kasi’s 1993 attack at the CIA — which, at the time, constituted the most brutal assault of Federal workers on US soil — was perpetrated with a newly purchased AK-47 rifle shot into the cars of Frank A. Darling and Dr. Lansing Bennett. Both intelligence officers were killed instantly. Three other persons waiting in their cars outside the CIA were wounded.
Kasi, 37, grew up in a wealthy family in Quetta, Pakistan, about 40 miles from the Afghanistan border. Ethnically, he is a Pashtun, a minority group in his part of Pakistan, but the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan.
In late 1990, a year after his father died, Kasi made what is now seen as a curious trip to Germany before coming to the United States in 1991, when he settled in Virginia, frequently shifting apartments, or staying with friends.
According to an intelligence brief prepared by an analyst at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, an independent “think tank,” Kasi fled to New York the day after the killings and boarded a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Karachi, a city on Pakistan’s Indian Ocean coastline. From there he went to his hometown of Quetta. Later Kasi crossed the Afghan border and took refuge in a Pashtun tribal area.
On June 15, 1997, after 29 months of tracking him, FBI agents captured Kasi in a motel on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and he was brought back to the United States for trial.
During his trial in 1998, Kasi said he had no religious preference.
However, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a Virginia daily newspaper, reports Kasi told the FBI he would not shoot women because it was against his religion.
Also, an FBI agent testified Kasi said he wanted to punish the United States for bombing Iraq, its involvement in the killing of Palestinians, and the deep involvement of the CIA in the internal affairs of Muslim countries.
“He certainly indicated that his intention was to make a political statement,” Horan says.
“He indicated that he was going to take people out at either the CIA or the Israeli Embassy,” Horan adds. “But he chose the CIA because he felt there would be fewer people around with weapons.”
According to the Foreign Policy Research Institute report, another link that might be worth looking into is the fact that in February of 1993, one month after Kasi killed the two CIA officers, a truck bomb exploded under the New York’s World Trade Center, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 people.
The man who was convicted for planning the bombing, Ramzi Yousef, fled the country using the same route Kasi had taken 30 days before.
He, too, was later captured, extradited, tried and sentenced to more than 200 years in prison by a federal judge in New York City.
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said Kasi is the only Muslim extremist that he knows of on death row. Dieter says the killings outside the CIA “may have been religiously motivated in a sort of abhorrent way, and I don’t have any reason to deny he was part of a terrorist cell.”
Kasi has been on death row since Feb. 6, 1998. He has filed 91 separate legal appeals of his sentence before the Virginia Supreme Court. His most recent appeal claims that the methods used by the FBI to bring him back to America were illegal.
On Sept. 11 — the very day that the World Trade Center was attacked and collapsed, killing more than 6,000 people, and the day almost 200 died in the attack on the Pentagon — a federal magistrate in Norfolk responded to Kasi’s latest appeal: The judge rejected it.
