The plea deal has angered many Indians, already frustrated by the slow progress in the investigations into the brazen attack that unfolded over three days and shook this city. So far, only one person has been convicted in the case in India: the sole surviving gunman in the attacks, Ajmal Kasab, who has been sentenced to death.
By Vikas Bajaj
and Hari Kumar
MUMBAI, India — An Indian court on
Saturday approved a request by prosecutors to charge an American citizen, David Coleman
Headley, in connection with the 2008 terrorist attacks here,
according to an official with the National
Investigation Agency. The decision, which is the first step in
seeking an extradition, sets up a possible confrontation between the United
States and India.
Mr. Headley has confessed in the
United States to playing a major role in the Mumbai attacks, which killed at
least 163 people, but he testified against another man tried in the attack to
avoid both the death penalty and extradition to India.
The plea deal has angered many
Indians, already frustrated by the slow progress in the investigations into the
brazen attack that unfolded over three days and shook this city. So far, only
one person has been convicted in the case in India: the sole surviving gunman
in the attacks, Ajmal Kasab, who has been sentenced to death.
The court on Saturday also approved
charges against seven Pakistanis and another man in the United States, Tahawwur
Rana. It was Mr. Rana whom Mr. Headley testified against in a United States
court. Mr. Rana was eventually acquitted of helping to plot the Mumbai attacks,
but he was found guilty of supporting plans to attack a Danish newspaper that
published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Pakistan has previously refused to
hand over people whom India has accused of plotting the attacks, in which 10
gunmen held Mumbai under siege, terrorizing five-star hotels, a busy train
station, a Jewish center, a popular bar and other locations.
The case of Mr. Headley, the son of
a Pakistani diplomat and a Philadelphia socialite, has become a particularly
delicate flash point in India-United States relations. It has been complicated
because of his background, which includes serving as an operative for Lashkar-e
Taiba — an Islamic militant group considered a terrorist organization by the
United States — as well as an informant for the Drug Enforcement
Administration.
In making the case for their plea
deal with Mr. Headley, prosecutors have described him as an important source of
information about Lashkar-e-Taiba and other extremists. Indian officials,
however, have expressed skepticism about Mr. Headley’s cooperation, saying
he has only given enough information to save his own life.
Vikas Bajaj
reported from Mumbai, and Hari Kumar from New Delhi. Ginger Thompson
contributed reporting from New York.
HONG’AI, China
— Despite the absence of road signs or promotional Web sites, a dozen or so
people each day manage to find their way to this sleepy hamlet that sits in the
fold of a dusky mountain in northwestern Qinghai Province.
They congratulate themselves for
having found the place — and for evading the police — but then come face to
face with Gonpo Tashi, a squat, no-nonsense barley farmer who guards the
entrance to the house where his uncle, the 14th Dalai
Lama, was born 76 years ago.
If the traveler speaks Tibetan, Mr.
Tashi, 65, will peer warily out into the road before swinging open the heavy
wooden doors and allowing entry to the modest home where China’s most reviled
and revered spiritual leader spent the first three years of his life.
If the visitor is Han Chinese, the
country’s dominant ethnic group, the gatekeeper might grumble vaguely about
“the rules” but then relent.
But if the supplicant bears
patently Western features, Mr. Tashi can be relied upon to throw up his hands
with dramatic effect and shoo the interloper back toward the vehicle that made
the hourlong drive from the provincial capital. “Leave, leave now,” he will
shout. “If they come, you will be in trouble.”
“They” refers to the local public
security personnel who occasionally block the road to Hong’Ai or stand outside
the Dalai Lama’s ancestral home, especially when there is trouble brewing
somewhere on the expansive plateau where most of China’s 5.4 million ethnic
Tibetans live.
That this state-financed shrine to
the Dalai Lama exists at all highlights Beijing’s complex and contradictory
attitude toward a man it frequently describes as a terrorist, a separatist and
“a wolf in monk’s robes.” Since relations between the exiled Tibetan leader and
the Chinese government took a nose dive in the mid-1990s, even possession of
the Dalai Lama’s picture is considered a crime.
The government’s official line is
that the Dalai Lama is agitating for an independent Tibet,
even as he insists that he is seeking only meaningful autonomy. In recent
months, the government has sought to blame him for the self-immolations
of about two dozen Tibetans, a ghastly act of protest against Chinese rule that
he has condemned.
Hong’Ai, or Taktser as it is known
in Tibetan, has long been on the receiving end of that official ambivalence. In
the mid-1980s, when talks were proceeding reasonably well, the government
rebuilt the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, which had been destroyed during
the antireligious fervor of the Cultural Revolution.
In 2010, the local Communist Party
poured 2.6 million renminbi, or about $410,000, into Hong’Ai, upgrading the
town’s 54 residences, including the Dalai Lama’s homestead, with the aim of
turning the place into a lucrative tourist attraction. The improvements
included tall, white-tile gates for every home and a colorfully painted but
imposing wall in front of the Dalai Lama’s home that prevents visitors from
peering inside.
In an article about the town in
2010, the official Xinhua news agency boasted that the improvements to each
house had cost more than 10 times as much as the average villager’s annual
income. “Everyone was enthusiastic,” a township official was quoted as saying
about the renovations.
Mr. Tashi, the caretaker, made out
particularly well, having received a modern toilet to replace an arrangement
that involved two planks over a trench. “Maybe when I am too old to squat, the
flush toilet will be useful,” Xinhua reported him as saying.
Other official
news accounts were slightly disparaging, calling him a “big shot”
and pointing out that his family owns a car paid for with a handsome government
salary augmented by visitor donations. Two of his three children, one article
said, are Communist Party members.
That same account said that Mr.
Tashi had visited his uncle twice in the 1990s in India and that he yearned for
his return. “I miss him very much,” he said.
According to official figures, a
majority of the town’s 274 residents are Han, and even those who describe
themselves as Tibetan cannot speak their ancestral tongue. In his 1990 autobiography,
“Freedom in Exile,” the Dalai Lama said his family spoke no Tibetan, only a
dialect of Mandarin. It was only when he and his family moved to Lhasa — after
high-ranking lamas identified him as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama —
that he learned the language.
In his book he described his
hometown in bleak terms, recounting the crop failures and the harsh winters.
His last visit was in 1955, four years before he fled to India during a failed
uprising against Chinese rule.
Those who make it past Mr. Tashi’s
temperamental door policy report that there are a few utilitarian rooms
surrounding a courtyard, its center anchored by a pole draped in multicolored
Tibetan prayer flags. Just as eye-catching is the late model Volkswagen,
covered by plastic drop cloth, that sits in one corner. One room contains a
bed, another a yellow throne and a Buddhist shrine.
Most of the two-story house is off
limits to visitors, and the only nod to the Dalai Lama is a small painting of
him on the ceiling. Photographs are forbidden.
Those villagers willing to speak to
foreign visitors were proud of their connection to a man who, under different
circumstances, might have been the most powerful religious figure in the land.
A 46-year-old woman who gave her name as Chobai and described herself as a
distant cousin said she had once traveled overland to India to visit him.
“We are all waiting for him to come
back one day,” she said with a smile.
Another woman a few doors down
offered a tour of her home and the shrine that includes two photographs of the
Dalai Lama, a distant relative.
After a trio of Dutch tourists
pounded on the front gate and refused to retreat, Mr. Tashi’s 45-year-old
nephew stepped outside and watched with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance.
When the police failed to
materialize, he seemed to relax as one of the tourists, Lisanne de Wit,
described a recent visit to Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives. Ms.
de Wit, a 19-year-old theology student, then made one last plea for entry,
describing how she had endured a weeklong bus ride from Sichuan Province to
reach this corner of Qinghai.
The nephew shrugged and offered a
sympathetic smile. “The order has come from above,” he said before shutting the
door. “And there’s nothing you or I can do about it.”
Mia Li
contributed research.
@The New York Times
