David Headley was in Lahore jail before 26/11 attacks

Pakistan-born Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley spent over a week in a Lahore jail on his estranged wife's complaint, three months before the Mumbai attacks in November 2008. Aloke Tikku reports.

Pakistan-born Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley spent over a week in a Lahore jail on his estranged wife's complaint, three months before the Mumbai attacks in November 2008.

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In course of his 34-hour questioning this June, Headley told Indian investigators about his detention on his wife Faiza Outalha's complaints. Faiza, he recalled, had been meeting senior police officers in Lahore and "creating problems for me".

"I was taken into the Lahore police custody on her complaint. I was in the Race Course police station for eight days," he told National Investigation Agency sleuths according to his interrogation report accessed by HT.

Headley also had to ask Major Iqbal, the army officer who was serving in the Inter Service Intelligence and playing his handler, to pull a few strings to secure his release.

His other wife Shazia Gilani's father, Javed Ahmed, bailed him out, Headley's interrogation report said. He married Shazia in 1999 and had shifted her and their four children to Chicago a month earlier.

On her part, Faiza had even approached Lashkar chief Hafiz Saeed to seek help to resolve the marital problems.

Saeed did ask Headley to get his house in order but did not persist when Headley made it clear that it would be at the cost of "LeT's operational activities", a reference to preparations for 26/11.

This was at least the second time the young Moroccan-born Faiza was creating trouble for Headley. Months after Faiza visited Headley during his third surveillance visit to Mumbai in March-May 2007, she approached US officials in Islamabad in end-December 2007.

According to New York Times, she told them about her husband's friends in LeT and her trips with him to the Taj Mahal Hotel, a prime 26/11 target.

In August 2005, Headley's third wife had tipped off the FBI in New York about his terror links. But there is no indication any action was taken against him.