1993 CIA shootings

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An attack took place on January 25, 1993 near the entrance of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia where two CIA employees were murdered and three others wounded. The perpetrator, Mir Aimal Kasi, shot CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a stoplight.

Kasi fled the country and was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, sparking a four year international manhunt. He was captured by FBI agents in Pakistan in 1997 and rendered back to the United States to stand trial. He admitted that he shot the victims of the attack, and was subsequently found guilty of capital and first-degree murder, and executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Contents 1 Background 2 Shootings 3 Investigation 4 Capture and rendition 5 Trial and execution 6 Motives 7 Victims 8 Memorials 8.1 Central Intelligence Agency memorial wall 8.2 Route 123 Memorial 8.3 Lansing Bennett Forest 9 References 10 See also 11 External links

[edit] Background

Kasi (Arabic: مير أيمال كانسي‎) was a Pakistani national, born in Quetta, Balochistan^[1] on February 10, 1964,^[2] and belonging to the Pashtun tribe of Kasi^[1]. He went to the US in 1991, taking a substantial sum of cash he had inherited on the death of his father in 1989^[1]. He travelled on false papers bought in Karachi, altering his name to "Kansi", and later bought a fake green card in Miami^[3]. He stayed with a Kashmiri friend, Zahed Mir^[4], in his Reston, Virginia apartment, and invested in a courier firm^[1] for which he would also work as a driver^[5]. This work would be decisive in his choice of target: "I used to pass this area almost every day and knew these two left-turning lanes [were] mostly people who work for CIA."^[3]

According to Kasi, his first thoughts of an attack came after the purchase of an AK-47 from a Chantilly gun store. The plan soon became "more important than any other thing to [him]."^[3]

[edit] Shootings

At around 8 a.m. on January 25, 1993, Kasi stopped his brown station wagon behind a number of vehicles waiting at a red traffic light on the eastbound side of Route 123, Fairfax County.^[6] The vehicles were waiting to make a left turn into the main entrance of CIA headquarters. Kasi emerged from his vehicle with an AK-47 and proceeded to move among the lines of vehicles, firing into them. Within seconds, he had killed Lansing H. Bennett MD, 66, and Frank Darling, 28. Three others were left with gunshot wounds.^[5] Darling was shot first and later received additional gunshot wounds to the head after Kasi shot the other victims.

During his later confession, Kasi said that he'd only stopped firing because "there wasn't anybody else left to shoot", and that he only shot male passengers because "it would be against [his] religion to shoot females".^[5]

He was also surprised at the lack of an armed response: "I thought I will be arrested, or maybe killed in a shootout with CIA guards or police."^[3]

Kasi climbed back into his vehicle and drove to a nearby park. After 90 minutes of waiting, it became clear that he was not being actively sought and so he drove back to his Reston apartment^[5]. He hid the assault rifle in a green plastic bag under a sofa, went to a McDonald's for something to eat, and booked himself into a Days Inn for the night. The CNN news reports he watched made it clear that police had misidentified his vehicle and did not have his license plate number.^[4] The next morning, he took a flight to Quetta, Pakistan.^[1]

[edit] Investigation

An investigative task force (named "Langmur" for "Langley murders") was drawn together from both the FBI and local Fairfax County police. They began sifting through recent AK-47 purchases in Maryland and Virginia—there had been at least 1,600 over the previous year alone. Mir Aimal Kasi's name was on the sales slip from a gun store in Chantilly, where he had exchanged another gun for the AK-47^[4] just three days before the shootings.^[5]

This information provided the first solid lead in the investigation when Kasi's roommate, Zahed Mir, reported him missing two days after the shootings.^[5] He also told police how Kasi would get angry watching CNN reports of attacks on Muslims^[4] — in particular, Kasi would later cite the US attacks on Iraq, Israeli killings of Palestinians, and CIA involvement in Muslim countries.^[3][5] Although Mir didn't think much of it at the time, Kasi had said he wanted to do "something big", with possible targets of the White House, the Israeli Embassy and the CIA.^[4]

A police search of Kasi's apartment turned up the hidden AK-47 under the couch. Ballistics tests confirmed it was the weapon used in the shootings, and Kasi became the chief suspect of the investigation.^[4]

Kasi was listed as one of the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.^[7] The search was focused on Pakistan, and agents spent the next four years following hundreds of leads, taking them as far afield as Thailand, but to no avail.^[4] Kasi would later reveal he had spent this time being sheltered by fellow Pashtun tribesmen, in the border regions of Afghanistan, making only brief visits to Pakistan.^[3][5]

[edit] Capture and rendition

In May 1997, an informant walked into the US consulate in Karachi and claimed he could help lead them to Kasi. As proof, he showed a copy of a driver license application made by Kasi under a false name but bearing his photograph. Apparently, the Pashtun tribals who had been sheltering Kasi were now prepared to accept the multi-million dollar reward offer for his capture.^[8] Other sources claim they were pressured by the Pakistani government.^[1]

Kasi was in the Afghan border regions, so the informant was told to lure Kasi into Pakistan where he could be more easily apprehended. Kasi was tempted with a lucrative business offer—smuggling Russian electronic goods into Pakistan—which brought him to Dera Ghazi Khan, in the Punjab province of Pakistan, where he checked into a room at Shalimar Hotel.^[8]

At 4 a.m. on the morning of June 15, 1997, an armed team of FBI agents, working with the Pakistani ISI, raided Kasi's hotel room. His fingerprints were taken on the scene, confirming his identity.

Kasi was transferred to a disputed location—US authorities claim it was a holding facility run by Pakistani authorities^[5], while Pakistani sources claim it was the US embassy in Islamabad^[8] — before being flown to the US on June 17 in a C-141 transport.^[9][5]

During the flight, Kasi made a full oral and written confession to the FBI.^[5]

Kasi's extrajudicial rendition was controversial in Pakistan—no formal request for his extradition was made, and no extradition proceedings were initiated.^[9] US authorities would later assert the rendition was legal under an extradition treaty signed with the UK, back when Pakistan was under colonial rule.^[5] Kasi argued against his rendition in court but his assertions were found to have no basis in law. The Court wrote:

…the treaty between the United States and Pakistan contains no provision that bars forcible abductions, nor does it otherwise 'purport to specify the only way in which one country may gain custody of a national of the other country for the purposes of prosecution.' Id. at 664 (emphasis added). Nor does the treaty provide that, once a request for extradition is made, the procedures outlined in the treaty become the sole means of transferring custody of a suspected criminal from one country to the other. Finally, because Kasi was not returned to the United States via extradition proceedings initiated under the Extradition Treaty between the United States and Pakistan, Kasi's reliance upon United States v. Rauscher does not avail him.^[10]

[edit] Trial and execution

On February 16, 1993, Kasi, then a fugitive, had been charged in absentia. The charges involved capital murder of Darling, murder of Bennett, and three counts of malicious wounding for the other victims, along with related firearms charges.

Kasi was tried by a single jury over a period of ten days in November 1997, on a plea of not guilty to all charges. The jury found him guilty, and fixed punishment for the capital murder charge at death.^[5] On February 4, 1998, Kasi was sentenced to death for the capital murder of Darling, who was shot at the beginning of the attack and again after the other victims had been shot. Among his other punishments were a life sentence for the first-degree murder of Bennett, multiple 20-year sentences for the malicious woundings, and fines totalling $600,000.^[5]

On November 12, 1997, four US oil executives and their Pakistani taxi driver were shot dead in Karachi, in what was described as a deliberate response to Kasi's guilty verdict.^[11]

Kasi was executed by lethal injection on November 14, 2002, at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia.^[12]

[edit] Motives

Kasi's stated motives were political, and he claimed they stemmed from watching Gulf War news coverage of US warplanes bomb Iraqi troops during their 1991 withdrawal from Kuwait. "Once the Iraqis withdrew from Kuwait then the continued bombings of Iraq were not justified … I did not want to become famous. I wanted to punish those who do wrong things against Muslim countries like Iraq."

He thought that by attacking CIA workers he could somehow change policy: "I am not proud of what happened. I feel sad [that] the people who came under attack were not powerful people … I wish powerful people would have come under the attack, then it would have been better. I wanted to shoot [then-CIA Director] James Woolsey but was not able to find him, or his timing of coming or going to CIA. If I had found [former CIA Director Robert] Gates I would have attacked him, as these are people who make up policies for CIA or US government."^[3]

In the wake of the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993, authorities were eager to determine whether Kasi had acted alone or was part of a larger terrorist network.^[4]. The CIA and FBI were unable to find any links to terrorist organizations,^[12] and participants in Kasi's murder trial were prohibited by the court from using the label "terrorist" in relation to the defendant.^[5] Kasi denied any connection to foreign terrorists and said that he had worked alone.^[3]

FBI agent Bradley J. Garrett, who played a leading role in the capture of Kasi—as well as that of Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the World Trade Center bombing—noted a similarity in their motives. "It was almost illogic logic … It wasn't personal. It wasn't like hating individuals. It was more institutional."^[4]

Before Kasi's capture and confession, some US sources speculated that the attack was related to undisclosed family links to the CIA.^[13] Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistani intelligence (ISI), alleged that Kasi had once worked for the CIA and was motivated by revenge. Gul—who had worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan War—told a reporter in August, 1997 that "Aimal Kasi was an agent of the CIA … He was working inside of Pakistan and outside of Pakistan."^[3] Kasi in turn denied these allegations, stating, "I did not work for CIA … I had mujahideen friends who worked with the ISI people in bringing [CIA-supplied] arms from military bases in Pakistan to the mujahideen arms depot [in Afghanistan]. I sometimes used to go with them. That was all."^[3]

[edit] Victims

The two fatalities of Kasi's attack were Lansing H. Bennett M.D., 66, and Frank Darling, 28, both CIA employees. Bennett, with experience as a physician, was working as an intelligence analyst assessing the health of foreign leaders.^[14] Darling worked in covert operations.^[4]

The three people wounded in the attack were Calvin Morgan, 61, an engineer; Nicholas Starr, 60, a CIA analyst; and Stephen E. Williams, 48, an AT&T employee.^[4]

[edit] Memorials

[edit] Central Intelligence Agency memorial wall

Bennett and Darling were memorialized as the 69th and 70th entries on the CIA's memorial "wall of stars" in the foyer of the Langley headquarters building,^[15] although President Clinton, in an address to the CIA, attributed the two individuals as the 55th and 56th stars.^[16]

[edit] Route 123 Memorial

The Route 123 Memorial, consisting of a granite wall and two benches facing each other near the site of the shooting, is dedicated to Bennett and Darling.^[17] This memorial is illumnated at night. The memorial is not at the exact location of the shooting due to traffic reasons.

An inscription reads:

In Remembrance of Ultimate Dedication to Mission Shown by Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency Whose Lives Have Been Taken or Forever Changed by Events at Home and Abroad.

Dedicato Par Aevum
(Dedicated to Service)
May 2002

The memorial was dedicated May 24, 2002.^[17]

[edit] Lansing Bennett Forest

Bennett has had a forest renamed in his honor—the Lansing Bennett Forest in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where he was formerly chair of the Duxbury Conservation Commission.[1]

Bennett is buried in Dennis Village Cemetery, Route 6A, north of Bourne, Massachusetts.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• 1993 World Trade Center bombing

[edit] External links

• Article about Princeton alumnus, Lansing Bennett, M.D., detailing his medical career, State Department work, CIA work. [2]
• Princeton thesis written by Bennett [3]