Update (1/17): U.S. District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber has delivered a sentence of 14 years to Tahawwur Rana.
Editor's Note: We will update this story later today after a sentence is imposed.
The latest chapter in the saga of the Mumbai terror attacks plays out today in a federal courtroom in Chicago, where an accused U.S. accomplice faces sentencing for his role in supporting the Pakistani militant group accused of carrying out the 2008 massacre with cooperation from Pakistan's intelligence service.
After a trial in 2011, a jury convicted Tahawwur Rana, 52, a Pakistani businessman and longtime resident of Chicago, of providing material support to the Lashkar-i-Taiba militant group and to a foiled plot in Denmark in 2009.
Rana was acquitted on additional charges that he was an accomplice in the spectacular Mumbai attacks, which killed 166 people, including six U.S. citizens. But his trial revealed strong evidence that Pakistan's powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), played a direct role in an attack that was designed to kill Americans and other Westerners. Pakistan receives billions of dollars in U.S. aid.
Rana is a relatively minor figure in the Mumbai case. He is important chiefly because of his long friendship with the star prosecution witness: the enigmatic David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant who has pleaded guilty to serving as an operative of Lashkar, the ISI and al Qaeda and who helped plan the Mumbai attack.
Headley is scheduled to be sentenced next week. A plea agreement enabled him to escape the death penalty for his role in the killings.
Rana helped Headley conduct reconnaissance in India and Denmark by allowing him to work as an overseas representative of his immigration consulting firm. That enabled Headley to open an office in Mumbai, obtain visas and otherwise maintain a cover during his travels.
Headley and Rana were arrested in Chicago in October 2009 as Headley worked with al Qaeda chiefs to prepare an attack against a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Lashkar and the ISI launched that plot as a follow-up to the Mumbai attacks, then backed off, causing Headley to join forces with al Qaeda.
In testimony that gave an unprecedented look into the terrorist underworld in Pakistan, Headley described how he was recruited, trained, funded and directed by Lashkar and the ISI to do two years of surveillance on luxury hotels, a Jewish center and other targets in Mumbai.
Federal prosecutors used Headley's account and corroborating evidence to file charges against a suspected mastermind of the Mumbai attacks known only as Major Iqbal, Headley's alleged ISI handler — the first time the U.S. government has charged a serving Pakistani intelligence officer with terrorism.
Prosecutors also charged three Lashkar bosses who directed the three-day rampage by 10 gunmen in Mumbai from a control room in Pakistan. Pakistani authorities arrested one of those militant bosses and a few other suspects, whose trial in Pakistan has stalled. The failure to judge them and capture other top figures has intensified accusations that Pakistan protects Lashkar, which Western and Indian counterterror agencies regard as a proxy of the ISI.
Major Iqbal remains a serving officer in the ISI, and accused masterminds including Sajid Mir, whose voice was caught on telephone intercepts as he directed the slaughter in Mumbai, continue to run the militant group, according to Western and Indian investigators.
Rana's attorneys argue that their client was the dupe of Headley, portraying him as a consummate con man who the lawyers say manipulated his old friend just as he juggled alliances with government agencies and terrorist groups.
In documents filed with the court for today's sentencing hearing, Rana's lawyers said Headley kept their client in the dark about most details of the plot against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark. The attorneys argued that Rana was less culpable than Headley's wife, Shazia, who has not been charged despite the fact that, in an email presented during the trial, she allegedly congratulated Headley on the success of the attacks.
Attorneys describe Rana, a father of three with a medical degree from Pakistan, as a loving family man with a clean record. They say his health has deteriorated dramatically during more than three years in jail.
Prosecutors assert that Rana was an eager conspirator who celebrated the carnage in Mumbai and continued to help Headley use the immigration firm as cover for his overseas reconnaissance for a similar attack in Denmark. They say Rana knew for years of Headley's terror activities and used terrorist tradecraft to conceal his communications with Headley, Major Iqbal and an al Qaeda chief who oversaw the Denmark plot.
In new evidence submitted before the hearing, prosecutors sought to undercut the depiction of Rana as a dupe by presenting a telephone intercept of Rana's wife saying that her husband and Headley were just alike and were both immersed in Islamic extremism.
The government has urged a sentence of 30 years; the defense has called for a sentence well below that.