Mir Aimal Kasi

Mir Aimal Kansi (incorrectly referred to as ''Mir Amir Kansi''; other names include ''Mir Amal Kanzi'', ''Mir Amal Kansi'', ''Mir Aimal Kasi'') ( February 10 , 1964 - November 14 , 2002 ) was a Pakistan i citizen who shot five people in their cars as they were turning towards the entrance to US CIA Headquarters on January 25 , 1993 . He was captured in Pakistan more than 4 years later and executed by lethal injection in the United States, following a trial.

Kasi was a native of Quetta , a city on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan . He was the son of a wealthy building contractor, and a member of the Pashtun tribe. He was well educated, earning a master's degree in English Literature from Baluchistan University in Quetta. He had previously worked with Mujahedeen , Afghani Guerrilla fighters, to transport US supplied weapons from military bases in Pakistan to Afghanistan . This was during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Kansi entered the United States in 1991 with fake papers that he bought in Karachi using the name Kansi. He lived in an apartment with a roommate, Zahed Mir, in Reston, Virginia , where he worked for Excel Courier Service making deliveries. He occasionally travelled to the CIA headquarters in this job. He bought the AK-47 from a Virginia Gun Dealer and began thinking of attacking the CIA headquarters. He knew that the line of cars that formed at this intersection each day mostly carried CIA employees.

On the morning of January 25 , 1993 , he drove his brown Datsun Station Wagon to the intersection and shot into several cars, killing two people and injuring three others. He had the opportunity to kill two females but did not do so. Upon being asked why by the FBI , he said that it was because Islam forbade the killing of women. After the shooting, he was surprised that he was still alive and returned to his vehicle and fled the scene. He returned to his apartment and went to a convenient store where he got a ticket through the owner, who also owned a travel agency, and got dropped at the airport to board the flight to Pakistan shortly thereafter. He first returned to his hometown in Quetta , where he had family. Kansi had two brothers who were wealthy landowners. After a couple of days, without telling anyone in his family, Kansi disappeared across the border into Afghanistan .

He was identified as the prime suspect when his roommate filed a missing persons report on January 28 , concerned about his unexplained absence. Police found the AK-47 in the apartment and matched it to shell casings found at the scene of the shootings. Kansi called his roommate on January 30 , saying that "he had to leave in a hurry". The jacket found at the apartment had glass embedded into it from three cars that Kansi had shot into.

On February 9 , 1993, The FBI Named Kansi As The 435th Fugitive To Be Added on their Top Ten Most Wanted List . The State Department offered a $2 million reward and later increased the reward to $3.5 million. After four and a half years, he was captured. A reliable informant gave the information as to his whereabouts and arranged for Kansi to be in the hotel where he was captured. On June 15 , 1997 , Kansi travelled to the town of Dera Ghazi Khan in central Pakistan as part of a business venture to import Russian electronics into Pakistan. He was captured in an early morning raid led by the FBI and transported to Fairfax, Virginia to stand trial. Kansi suspected that he was set up by his business partners to obtain the reward money offered by the United States. He was never officially extradited from Pakistan, and US officials have never stated the country in which he was captured. However, some sources say the FBI received both the permission for his arrest in a hotel room, as well as the extradition papers after the arrest and a helicopter flight to Islamabad.

Although he pled not guilty at trial, he did not deny the acts. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He died by Lethal Injection in a Virginia state Prison .

QUOTES

Kasi did not testify in his trial and has never spoken to the media. But in a series of 10 letters Kasi began writing to this reporter in December, he described his bitterness at the United States government for bombing Iraq and his life on the lam after the Jan. 25, 1993, shootings and said his only regret today is that he didn't kill some CIA higher-ups instead.

In letters to Salon's correspondent, Pakistani terrorist Mir Aimal Kasi -- who faces the death penalty for killing two CIA employees -- explains why he did it, recounts his life on the lam and says his only regret is that he didn't kill higher-ranking CIA officials.

He wanted to assassinate the head of the CIA but couldn't find him, settling instead for a rush-hour attack on the spy agency's employees outside their front gate.

He acted alone, and traveled freely in Afghanistan afterward -- even going to religious services with the country's prime minister.

And, during the more than four years that Pakistani gunman Mir Aimal Kasi eluded a global manhunt, he dreamed of slipping back into the United States and doing it all over again.

Those are some of the revelations in a series of letters the 33-year-old Kasi has written from his jail cell in Fairfax County, Va., where a judge Friday sentenced him to death by lethal injection.

Five years ago this Sunday, Kasi sprayed a line of cars outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., with AK-47 rifle fire, killing two agency employees and wounding three other people. He pleaded not guilty but was convicted last November, with a jury recommendation that he be put to death.

"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," he wrote.

"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 U.S. government."

The Washington Post reported last year that CIA security agents had detected someone stalking Gates' suburban Virginia house a few weeks before the 1993 killings, with some speculating that it might have been Kasi. But the defendant said it wasn't him. "I never went to his house," he wrote.

Kasi also rejected the allegation by Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired head of Pakistani intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), that he had once worked for the CIA and had perhaps turned on the agency in an act of fury. Gul, who worked closely with the CIA during the Afghan War, insisted to this reporter in an interview in Rawalpindi last August that "Aimal Kasi was an agent of the CIA ... He was working inside of Pakistan and outside of Pakistan."

Kasi, however, declared, "I did not work for CIA." During the war in Afghanistan, he wrote, "I had mujahedeen (Afghan guerrilla) friends who worked with the ISI people in bringing (CIA-supplied) arms from military bases in Pakistan to the mujahedeen arms depot (in Afghanistan). I sometimes used to go with them. That was all."

Kasi got into the United States after buying false papers in Karachi and altering his name to "Kansi," he said. He later bought a fake green card in Miami.

Kasi denied he had any contacts with Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian or any other foreign terrorists, as has been alleged. He wrote that he was surprised that he hadn't been killed during his assault, which started when he stepped out of his car in morning rush-hour traffic and started firing at cars waiting to turn into the CIA's main gate in Langley, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

"I used to pass this area almost every day and knew these two left-turning lanes (were) mostly people who work for CIA," he wrote me.

"The attack on CIA was my idea alone ... Nobody in Pakistan knew about it. I alone planned everything and did it."

Kasi says the idea for the attack "started coming into my mind" after he purchased an AK-47 from a local Virginia gun dealer. After that, the planned attack was "more important than any other thing to me."

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Mir Aimal Kasi