Mumbai terror trial defense done after 2 witnesses

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Tahawwur Rana | CBS2 Chicago

Updated: July 15, 2011 12:16AM

Closing arguments are expected Tuesday in the federal trial of a Chicago businessman accused of assisting in the groundwork leading up to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Tahawwur Rana, 50, told U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber Monday that he was waiving his right to testify after his attorneys presented just two witnesses on his behalf.

“You know what Mr. Rana would have said? ‘I didn’t do it, and I didn’t know,’” defense attorney Charles Swift said, explaining why his client chose not to take the stand.

Swift and his co-counsel Patrick Blegen have argued that Rana was oblivious to David Coleman Headley’s deadly plans when he asked Headley to operate his Mumbai-based immigration office.

Headley — Rana’s childhood friend from Pakistan and the prosecution’s star witness — testified that he posed as a tourist and businessman while scouting and surveilling locations for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant Pakistan-based organization that carried out the bloody siege. Prosecutors maintain Rana approved and was a willing participant.

Rana is also accused of helping Headley with a foiled plot targeting a Danish newspaper that published controversial depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. That scheme, according to Headley, was orchestrated by Illyas Kashmiri — the Pakistani al-Qaeda commander believed to have been killed in a U.S. drone attack last week.

Earlier Monday, federal prosecutors played several-minute snippets of Rana’s six-hour videotaped interrogation.

Rana, whose gray hair appears to be dyed in the video, said Headley told him that he trained with Lashkar” and that he was “affiliated” with the group and Pakistan’s intelligence agency. But Rana also is heard saying that Headley often engaged in “loose talk.”

Testifying for the defense Monday, immigration lawyer David Morris said he conducted informational seminars in several Indian cities for Rana’s company in 1997. The seminars were “moderately successful,” Morris said, though he added that it didn’t make sense to expand in India at the time but that Rana spoke about that possibility for the future.

Computer forensics expert Yaniv Moshe Schiff also testified for the defense, telling jurors that none of the 19 computers in Rana’s home or office were used to access any video files of the Mumbai attacks.

There was one computer, though, that indicted someone did research on the Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that printed the cartoons considered offensive by Muslims worldwide, Schiff said.