Aimal Kansi

Aimal Kansi (10 February 1964 – 14 November 2002) was a Pakistani national who was convicted of the 1993 CIA headquarters shooting in Langley, Virginia. In the incident, Kansi shot and killed two CIA employees and wounded three others. He soon fled to Kandahar, Afghanistan, which later became a Taliban stronghold, and went into hiding for four years. While in Pakistan, he was caught and arrested by the FBI with help from Pakistani police forces. After being returned to the U.S., he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Background Kasi was an ethnic Pashtun born on 10 February 1964 in Quetta, Pakistan. His father was Abdullah Jan Kasi (or Qazi), a Tribal Malik.

He entered the United States in 1991 under the name Mir Aimal Kasi and brought a substantial sum of cash which he had inherited in 1989 upon the death of his father. He traveled on forged papers that he had purchased in Karachi, Pakistan. He had altered his name to "Kansi" and later bought a fake US green card in Miami, Florida.

He stayed with a Kashmiri friend, Zahid Mir, in a Reston, Virginia apartment, and he worked for a courier service. That 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." 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 his semi-automatic Type 56 assault rifle 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. He hid the rifle in a green plastic bag under a sofa, went to a McDonald's 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.

On 16 February 1993, Kasi, then a fugitive, had been charged in absentia. The charges involved the capital murder of Darling, the murder of Bennett, and three counts of malicious wounding for the other victims, along with related firearms charges.

Arrest and rendition In May 1997, an informant walked into the U.S. consulate in Karachi and claimed he could help lead them to Kasi. As proof, he showed a copy of a driver's license application made by Kasi under a false name but bearing his photograph. Apparently, the people who had been sheltering Kasi wanted the multimillion-dollar reward offer for his capture. Kasi stated, "I want to make it clear [that] the people who tricked me [...] were Pushtuns, they were owners of land in the Leghari and Khosa clan areas in Dera Ghazi Khan, but I will never name them."

As Kasi was in the dangerous Durand Line border region, 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 the Shalimar Hotel. During the flight, Kasi made full oral and written confessions to the FBI. Kansi's body was repatriated to Pakistan. His funeral was attended by the entire civil hierarchy of Balochistan, the local Pakistan Army Corps Commander and the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi. Prayers in Pakistan's National Assembly were led by Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a religious leader elected from Quetta, who intoned, "God, destroy those who handed him over to America. God, his murderers, whether in America or in Pakistan, may they meet their fate soon." (Ahmad was a member of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F).)

Legacy Mir Aimal Khān Kasi Jumaat is a mosque named after him in the port city of Ormara in his home province of Balochistan, by the Arabian Sea.