David Headley

David Coleman Headley (born Daood Sayed Gilani; June 30, 1960) is an American terrorist.

He is currently serving a 35-year sentence in the United States after pleading guilty to 12 international terrorism charges.

It has been alleged that Headley made periodic trips to Pakistan for Lashkar-e-Taiba training while simultaneously working as an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), but this is disputed.

In 1960, shortly after Gilani was born, his family left the United States and settled in Lahore, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab.

There, Gilani stood out because of his light skin color—he was often called a gora, meaning "foreigner", predominantly used for Americans and Europeans—and because of the heterochromic coloration of his eyes.

Gilani's mother was unable to adapt to Pakistani culture and returned to the U.S. Due to Pakistani custody rules, she was forced to leave her children with their father in Lahore.

After getting a divorce, she went through four more marriages and spent time in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.

Daood Gilani was raised in a political environment steeped in Pakistani nationalism and Islamic conservatism, both of which were amplified by Pakistani tensions with India.

During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, stray bombs hit Gilani's elementary school in Karachi and killed two people; this event, along with Pakistan's defeat at the war's conclusion, is thought to have stoked Gilani's animus towards India.

Gilani went on to attend the elite Cadet College Hasan Abdal, a boys' military prep school.

Gilani remained in contact with classmates, and later engaged in impassioned debates with them about politics and Islam in e-mail correspondence.

In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Gilani left a contentious relationship with his Pakistani stepmother and moved to the U.S. with the help of his biological mother, Serrill Headley.

Gilani settled with his mother in Philadelphia, where he helped her manage the Khyber Pass Pub and the adjacent Miss Headley's Wine Bar.

Employees at the pub nicknamed him "The Prince."

Gilani enrolled at a military high school, Valley Forge Military Academy, but dropped out after one semester.

In 1985, he married a Pennsylvania State University student, but they divorced two years later due to cultural differences.

He eventually moved to New York City and opened a video rental business.

During his frequent trips to Pakistan, Gilani hung out with heroin users and started using the drug himself.

He became involved in Pakistani drug trafficking.

When he was twenty-four, Gilani smuggled half a kilogram of heroin out of Pakistani tribal areas and used Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Pakistani army doctor who Gilani knew from military school, as an unwitting shield.

Several days later, police in Lahore arrested Gilani for drug possession, but he somehow managed to beat the charges.

In 1988, while he was traveling to Philadelphia from Pakistan, Gilani was arrested by police in Frankfurt, West Germany after two kilos of heroin were found hidden in a false bottom in his suitcase.

Gilani quickly made a plea deal when his case was handed over to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, agreeing to surrender his partners in Philadelphia in exchange for a lighter sentence.

He was a student at the Community College of Philadelphia but dropped out without a degree in the 1990s.

Rana continued to be used by Gilani over the course of his career as a drug trafficker; in the late 1990s, after Rana had emigrated to the U.S., Gilani used Rana's legitimate immigration consulting company in Chicago to smuggle drugs.

Under the direction of Lashkar chiefs, Headley performed five surveillance missions in Mumbai to scout targets for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people.

The following year, he performed a similar mission in Copenhagen to help plan an attack against the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had published cartoons of Muhammad.

He was arrested at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago while on his way to Pakistan in October 2009.

U.S. authorities gave Indian investigators direct access to Headley,

but some in India have questioned why the U.S. had not shared suspicions about him with Indian authorities before the Mumbai attacks.

At the trial of Tahawwur Hussain Rana, an alleged co-conspirator, Headley gave detailed information about the participation of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in carrying out the attacks.

Since his arrest and guilty plea, Headley has cooperated with U.S. and Indian authorities and given information about his associates.

On January 24, 2013, a U.S. federal court sentenced Headley to 35 years in prison for his role in the Mumbai attacks.

Headley was prosecuted by a Mumbai special court in early February 2016, via a video link from his prison cell in the United States.

He was prosecuted by special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam, the same lawyer who represented the state during the Mumbai attack trials.

David Coleman Headley was born as Daood Sayed Gilani in Washington, D.C., to Sayed Salim Gilani and Alice Serrill Headley.

Sayed Gilani was a well-known Pakistani diplomat and broadcaster.

Serrill Headley, originally from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and a prominent figure in Philadelphia high society, worked as a secretary at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Daood Gilani has a younger sister, Syedah, and a half-brother, Danyal.

As an adult, Danyal Gilani became the spokesman for Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and presently serves as Pakistan's press attaché in Beijing.