1993 shootings at CIA Headquarters

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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 killed 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 Pakistan 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 was executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Background

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Aimal Kasi, shortly after his capture in 1997

Kasi (Arabic: مير أيمال كانسي‎) was a Pakistani national, born in Quetta, Balochistan on February 10, 1964, and belonging to the Pashtun tribe of Kasi. He went to the US in 1991, taking a substantial sum of cash he had inherited on the death of his father in 1989. He travelled on forged papers he had purchased in Karachi, altering his name to "Kansi", and later bought a fake green card in Miami. He stayed with a Kashmiri friend, Zahed Mir, in his Reston, Virginia apartment, and invested in a courier firm for which he also worked as a driver. 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."

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]."

Shootings

At around 8 a.m. on January 25, 1993, Kasi stopped a borrowed brown Datsun station wagon behind a number of vehicles waiting at a red traffic light on the eastbound side of Route 123, Fairfax County. 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 a total of 10 rounds into them, killing Lansing H. Bennett, 66, and Frank Darling, 28. Three others were left with gunshot wounds. 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".

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."

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. 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. The next morning, he took a flight to Quetta, Pakistan. According to Kasi, he killed American CIA people because, "I was real angry with the policy of the U.S. government in the Middle East, particularly toward the Palestinian people," Kasi said in a prison interview with CNN affiliate WTTG.

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 just three days before the shootings.

This information provided the first solid lead in the investigation when Kasi's roommate, Zahed Mir, reported him missing two days after the shootings. He also told police how Kasi would get angry watching CNN reports of attacks on Muslims — in particular, Kasi would later cite the US attacks on Iraq, Israeli killings of Palestinians, and CIA involvement in Muslim countries. 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.

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.

Kasi was listed as one of the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. 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. 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.

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. Other sources claim they were pressured by the Pakistani government.

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.

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.

There is some dispute over where Kasi was taken next—US authorities claim it was a holding facility run by Pakistani authorities, while Pakistani sources claim it was the US embassy in Islamabad — before being flown to the US on June 17 in a C-141 transport.

During the flight, Kasi made a full oral and written confession to the FBI.

Kasi's extrajudicial rendition was controversial in Pakistan—no formal request for his extradition was made, and no extradition proceedings were initiated. US authorities would later assert the rendition was legal under an extradition treaty signed with the UK, before Partition when India was under colonial rule. 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.

Trial

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.

During the trial the defense introduced testimony from Dr. Richard Restak a neurologist and also a neuropsychiatrist, that Kasi was missing tissue from his frontal lobes, a congenital defect that made it hard for him to judge the consequence of his actions. This testimony was re-iterated by another psychiatrist for the defense based upon independent examination.

Kasi was tried by a Virginia state court 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. 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.

Possible vendetta

Days before Kasi's conviction in November 1997, four US oil executives and their Pakistani taxi driver were shot dead in Karachi, in what has been described as a deliberate response to Kasi's guilty verdict.

Execution

Kasi was executed by lethal injection on November 14, 2002, at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia. Kasi's body was repatriated to Pakistan, his funeral was attended by the entire civil hierarchy of Baluchistan, the local Pakistan Army Corps Commander and the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi.

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. Darling worked in covert operations.

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.

Memorials

Central Intelligence Agency memorial wall

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The CIA Memorial Wall at their Langley headquarters, on which Bennett and Darling are memorialized

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, although President Clinton, in an address to the CIA, attributed the two individuals as the 55th and 56th stars.

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. This memorial is illuminated at night. The memorial is not at the exact location of the shooting due to traffic reasons.

An inscription reads:

<poem>

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

</poem>

The memorial was dedicated May 24, 2002.

Lansing Bennett Forest

A forest was renamed in Bennett's honor—the Lansing Bennett Forest in Duxbury, Massachusetts, where he was formerly chair of the Duxbury Conservation Commission.

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

Kasi's Memorial

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Mosque in built in the name of Kasi in his home province of Balochistan, Pakistan

Kasi is memorialized through a mosque build with his name as Shaheed Aimal Kansi masjid (Martyr Aimal Kansi mosque) in the port city of Ormara in Kansi's home province of Balochistan in Pakistan.

See also

• 1993 World Trade Center bombing

External links

• Article about Princeton alumnus, Lansing Bennett, M.D., detailing his medical career, State Department work, CIA work
• Princeton thesis written by Bennettsh:Mir Aimal Kansi

fi:Mir Aimal Kasi