US checking report if FBI ignored tip on Headley

NEW DELHI - The US Saturday said it was looking into a media report that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had a tip about David Coleman Headley’s links with a terror group in Pakistan three years before terrorists struck Mumbai in 2008.

“We are looking into published reports about possible information related to David Headley that goes back before the Mumbai attacks and how such information may have been handled,” US ambassador to India Timothy Roemer said in a statement here.

Roemer’s remarks came after the Washington Post reported that US investigators had known of Headley’s training trips to Pakistan before the Nov 26, 2008 attacks on targets in Mumbai he visited and scouted.

This information was not disclosed to Indians even as Indian investigators were given access to Headley in a US prison to question him about the Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed.

The information about Headley’s trips to Pakistan was passed on to FBI by his wife after a domestic row that resulted in his arrest in August 2005, the Washington Post said in the report by ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom.

Roemer said the US was taking “counterterrorism cooperation with our Indian partners very seriously.

“Our respective intelligence and law enforcement professionals work very closely together on terrorism issues of mutual concern,” he said.

The envoy noted that the US authorities would “be in a position to speak to the specific claims” only after “we have determined exactly what transpired”.

“I can say that it is our policy and practice to share terrorism-related information promptly with our foreign partners, when we deem that information potentially credible and relevant to their national security. We do exactly that with partners around the world every day, including India,” Roemer said.