CIA Headquarters Shooting Wikipedia Article

On January 25, 1993, outside the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters campus in Langley, Virginia, Pakistani national Mir Qazi (also spelled as Kasi or Kansi) killed two CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a stoplight and wounded three others.

Qazi fled the country and was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, sparking a four-year international manhunt. He was captured by a joint FBI-CIA/ISI task force in Pakistan in 1997 and rendered to the US to stand trial. He admitted shooting the victims, was found guilty of capital and first-degree murder, and was executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Mir Qazi (or Mir Aimal Kasi) was born in Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan, either on February 10, 1964, or January 1, 1967. He entered the US in 1991, taking a substantial sum of cash he had inherited on the death of his father in 1989. He travelled 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, Zahed Mir, in his Reston, Virginia, apartment, and invested in a courier firm for which he also worked as a driver. This 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."

According to Qazi, he first thought of attacking CIA personnel after buying a Chinese-made AK-47 from a Chantilly gun store. The plan soon became "more important than any other thing to [him]."

At around 8 a.m on January 25, 1993, Qazi stopped a borrowed brown Datsun station wagon 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. Qazi emerged from his vehicle with an AK-47 type semi-automatic 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. Darling was shot first and later received additional gunshot wounds to the head after Qazi shot the other people. According to a CIA release, "all the victims were full-time or contract employees with the agency." No other details were revealed.

During his later confession, Qazi said that he only stopped firing because "there wasn't anybody else left to shoot", and that he only shot male passengers because, as a Muslim, "it would be against [his] religion to shoot females". He was surprised at the lack of an armed response: "I thought I will be arrested, or maybe killed in a shootout with CIA guards or police."

Qazi climbed back into his vehicle and drove to a nearby park. After 90 minutes of waiting, he realized that he was not being actively sought and drove back to his Reston apartment. At the time reports said police were looking for a white male in his twenties and the shooting was not thought to be directly connected to the CIA. He hid the rifle in a green plastic bag under a sofa, went to a McDonald's to eat, and booked into a Days Inn for the night. He learned from CNN news reports that police had misidentified his vehicle and did not have his license plate number. The next morning, he took a flight to Quetta. Qazi stated his motive in a prison interview with CNN affiliate WTTG Fox 5: "I was real angry with the policy of the U.S. government in the Middle East, particularly toward the Palestinian people."

An investigative task force (named "Langmur" for "Langley murders") was drawn together from both the FBI and local Fairfax County police. They began sifting through recent AK-47 purchases in Maryland and Virginia—there had been at least 1,600 over the previous year alone. Mir Aimal Qazi's name was on the sales slip from a gun store in Chantilly, where he had exchanged another gun for the AK-47] just three days before the shootings.

This information provided the first solid lead in the investigation when Qazi's roommate, Zahed Mir, reported him missing two days after the shootings. He also told police how Qazi would get angry watching CNN reports of attacks on Muslims–in particular, Qazi would later cite the US attacks on Iraq, Israeli killings of Palestinians, and CIA involvement in Muslim countries. Although Mir did not think much of it at the time, Qazi had said he wanted to do "something big", with possible targets, the White House, the Israeli Embassy, and the CIA.

A police search of Qazi's apartment turned up the hidden AK-47 under the couch. Ballistics tests confirmed it was the weapon used in the shootings, and Qazi became the chief suspect of the investigation. He was listed as one of the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. The search focused on Pakistan, and agents spent the next four years following hundreds of leads, taking them as far afield as Thailand, but to no avail. Qazi would later reveal that he had spent this time being sheltered by fellow Pashtun tribesmen, in the border regions of Afghanistan, making only brief visits to Pakistan.

In May 1997, an informant walked into the U.S. consulate in Karachi and claimed he could help lead them to Qazi. As proof, he showed a copy of a driver's license application made by Qazi under a false name but bearing his photograph. Apparently, the people who had been sheltering Qazi were now prepared to accept the multimillion-dollar reward offer for his capture. Other sources claim they were pressured by the Pakistani government. Qazi 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."

Qazi was near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, so the informant was told to lure Qazi into Pakistan where he could be more easily apprehended. Qazi 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.

At 4 am on the morning of June 15, 1997, an armed team of FBI agents, working with the Pakistani ISI, raided Qazi's hotel room to arrest him. His fingerprints were taken at the scene, confirming his identity.

The two fatalities resulting from Qazi's attack were Lansing H. Bennett M.D., 66, and Frank Darling, 28, both CIA employees. Bennett, with experience as a physician, was working as an intelligence analyst assessing the health of foreign leaders. Darling worked in covert operations.

The three people wounded in the attack were Calvin Morgan, 61, an engineer; Nicholas Starr, 60, a CIA analyst; and Stephen E. Williams, 48, an AT&T employee.