Mumbai, Feb. 8: David Headley was born in 1960 and was named Daood Gillani. His father was a well-known radio broadcaster in Pakistan, Syed Saleem Gillani.

Gillani Senior went on to become the director-general of Pakistan Radio and then worked for the Pakistan embassy in the US.
Headley’s mother Serrill Headley was an American and was known in Philadelphia society circles. She met Saleem when she began working as a secretary in the Pakistani consulate in Philadelphia.

They married and moved to Pakistan after Daood’s birth. But unable to adapt to Pakistani culture and unable to get custody of her children after her divorce, Serrill returned to the US alone while Daood stayed on with his father who originally hailed from Gurudaspur in Indian Punjab.

Raised during the tumultuous years of the Bangladesh war in a political ambience ridden with Pakistani nationalism and religious conservatism, Daood went on to attend the elite Cadet College Hasan Abdal — a military school, in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
Headley said in his deposition today how at the age of 17, he left Pakistan to join his biological mother in the US. He settled in Philadelphia, enrolled at another military high school, dropped out and joined a local community college and left it without out a degree in the 1990s.

He said he married a student, Portia Peters, in 1985  and divorced her in 1987 to move to New York and start his own video rental business.

He was neither asked, nor did he mention during the deposition, how he joined the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), tasked with combating the drug menace, as an agent and how in 1989 he was sent to Afghanistan to collect information on drug lords. Later, he was planted by US agencies into the Lashkar-e-Toiba. He went rogue after that — but this was not discussed on Monday.

During the deposition, he spoke about his arrest in Chicago’s O’Hare airport by US agencies in October 2009.

According to an earlier testimony in the US, he had carrried out reconnaissance in Copenhagen on the Lashkars  instructions in 2009. The plan was to attack the Danish newspaper, Jyllandes Posten, for publishing cartoons on holy figures. He was arrested as he was readying to board a fight to Pakistan from Chicago.

Indian agencies claim the US arrested Headley after realising post-26/11 that he had turned rogue.