FBI calls Headley second-biggest catch of 2009

NEW DELHI: The FBI has described Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley, a key suspect in the Mumbai terror assault that left 166 people dead, as its second-biggest catch this year. The list contains people who started of as as extremist wannabes and ended as trusted brothers of terrorist operatives across the globe.

Headley figures at No. 2 in a list of some of the FBI’s “most significant cases in terms of their impact on the overall security”. Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed, the jihadists of Georgia, figure on the top of the FBI list. Forty-nine-year-old Headley, arrested in October, has been charged of conspiracy to bomb public places in India, to murder and maim persons in India and Denmark, to provide material support to foreign terrorist plots, to provide material support to LeT and to aid and abet murder of US citizens in India in the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

The top terror case cracked by the FBI was the arrest of two young jihadists in Georgia who were allegedly plotting attacks in the US.

“Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris Ahmed are young Americans with terror on their minds. The two middle-class kids barely out of high school who lived seemingly normal lives in and around Atlanta while secretly taking up the mantle of violent jihad,” the FBI said. Both have been sentenced this month and headed to prison. “Their story is indicative of both the evolving homegrown extremist threat and the FBI’s post-9/11 intelligence-driven investigations.”

At No. 3 is a terrorism-related case against eight men accused of recruiting at least 20 young Somali Americans from Minnesota to join an extremist Islamist insurgency in Somalia. The suspects make up one of the largest alleged terror networks in the US since 9/11, the agency said.