Intelligence sources have long maintained that Rana’s migration to Canada was part of a broader ISI strategy to “settle” its assets aboard.
Ahead of Extradition, Pakistan Says Tahawur Rana Is Not Pakistani, news today: Hours before Tahawur Rana’s extradition, Pakistan issued a statement denying his Pakistani nationality, claiming he is a Canadian citizen.
Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesperson Shafqat Ali Khan said, “He is a Canadian national, and as per our records, he has not renewed his Pakistani documents for over two decades.”
Tahawwur Hussain Rana was born in 1961 in Chichawatni, a small city in Pakistan’s Punjab province. He served as a doctor in the Pakistan Army before emigrating to Canada in the late 1990s or early 2000s, where he acquired Canadian citizenship. He later moved to the United States and settled in Chicago.
Rana co-owned an immigration consultancy firm, First World Immigration Services, in Chicago. This business was allegedly used as a front by David Coleman Headley to carry out reconnaissance for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
Rana is a close associate and childhood friend of Headley, the Pakistani-American terrorist who conducted surveillance in Mumbai ahead of the attacks. He was convicted by a U.S. court for providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and plotting an attack on the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
According to a report by The Times of India (TOI), intelligence sources have long maintained that Rana’s migration to Canada was part of a broader ISI strategy to “settle” its assets abroad and facilitate India-centric operations.
As also reported by TOI, Pakistan’s default response to terror attacks involving its nationals has often been denial. After the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, it initially claimed that Ajmal Kasab was Indian to portray the attack as homegrown. The terrorists carried fake Hindu IDs and wore saffron threads to support this claim. However, Kasab’s identity as a Pakistani citizen was later confirmed, leading to the dismissal of Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani for publicly acknowledging it.
