When Nawaz Sharif authorized a joint US-Pakistan operation to capture Aimal Kasai

 

 Mir Aimal Kasai was born in Quetta in1967. It is said that he was on the payroll of the CIA and had been performing various intelligence gathering and other covert tasks in Pakistan at the behest of the agency. Like Osama bin Laden, he fell afoul of his US taskmasters and decided to pay them back for abandoning him after he had outlived his utility for the CIA. To actualize his plan, Kasai entered the US in 1991, taking a substantial sum of cash he had inherited on the death of his father in 1989. He traveled on forged papers he had purchased in Karachi, Pakistan, altering his last name to "Kansi", and later bought a fake green card in Miami. He stayed with a Kashmiri friend, Zahid Mir, in his Reston, Virginia, apartment, and invested in a courier firm for which he also worked as a driver. On January 25, 1993, Kasai killed two CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a traffic signal and wounded three others outside the CIA headquarters campus in Langley, Virginia. Thereafter, he fled the US and was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, sparking a four-year international manhunt. In 1997, Nawaz Sharif, then PM of Pakistan, authorized a joint FBI- CIA/ISI operation in Pakistan. Even as with the Abbottabad operation to capture and kill Osama bin Laden, the CIA conducted a massive covert operation in Pakistan to apprehend Kasai. Hundreds of thousands of matchboxes bearing Kasai’s image and the offer of head money on him were distributed in the far-flung tribal areas of KP and Balochistan. In May 1997, an informant walked into the U.S. consulate in Karachi and claimed he could help lead them to Kasai. As proof, he showed a copy of a driver's license application made by Kasai under a false name but bearing his photograph. Apparently, the people who had been sheltering Kasai were now prepared to accept the multimillion-dollar reward offer for his capture. Other sources claim they were pressured by the Pakistani government. Kasai 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 (For fear of starting a never-ending clan feud, sic). Kasai was in the Afghan border regions, so the informant was told to lure Kasai into Pakistan where he could be more easily apprehended. He 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 Shalimar Hotel.

He was eventually captured in a joint raid on his hideout in the Shalimar Hotel. Kasai was handed over to the US to stand trial. He admitted to shooting the victims, was found guilty of capital and first-degree murder, and was executed by lethal injection in 2002.