Mir Amir Kansi
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Mir Amir Kansi (also known as Mir Amir Kasi) (February 10, 1964 -- November 14, 2002) was a Pakistani citizen who shot five people in their cars as they were turning towards the entrance to US CIA headquarters on January 25, 1993. He was captured in Pakistan and executed in the United States, following a trial.
Kasi was a native of Quetta, a city on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was the son of a wealthy building contractor, and a member of the Pashtun tribe. He was well educated, earning a master's degree in English Literature from Baluchistan University in Quetta. He had previously worked with mujahedeen, Afghani guerrilla fighters, to transport US supplied weapons from military bases in Pakistan to Afghanistan. This was during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Kasi entered the United States in 1991 with fake papers that he bought in Karachi using the name Kansi. He lived in an apartment with a roommate, Zahed Mir, in Reston, Virginia, where he worked for Excel Courier Service making deliveries. He occasionally travelled to the CIA headquarters in this job. He bought the AK-47 from a Virginia gun dealer and began thinking of attacking the CIA headquarters. He knew that the line of cars that formed at this intersection each day mostly carried CIA employees.
On the morning of January 25, 1993, he drove his brown Datsun station wagon to the intersection and shot into several cars. Afterwards, he returned to his vehicle and fled the scene. He returned to his apartment and then boarded a flight to Pakistan shortly after. He first returned to his hometown in Quetta, before disappearing across the border into Afghanistan.
He was identified as the prime suspect when his roommate filed a missing persons report on January 28, concerned about his unexplained absence. Police found the AK-47 in the apartment and matched it to shell casings found at the scene of the shootings. Kasi called his roommate on January 30, saying that "he had to leave in a hurry".
The FBI placed Kasi on their Top Ten Most Wanted List. The State Department offered a $2 million reward. After four and a half years, he was captured. On June 15, 1997, Kasi travelled to the town of Dera Ghazi Khan in central Pakistan as part of a business venture to import Russian electronics into Pakistan. He was captured in an early morning raid led by the FBI and transported to Fairfax, Virginia to stand trial. Kasi suspected that he was set up by his business partners to obtain the reward money offered by the United States. He was never officially extradited from Pakistan, and US officials have never stated the country in which he was captured. However, some sources say the FBI received both the permission for his arrest in a hotel room, as well as the extradition papers after the arrest and a helicopter flight to Islamabad.
Although he pled not guilty at trial, he did not deny the acts. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He died by lethal injection in a Virginia state prison.
Sources
- Convicted assassin: "I wanted to shoot the CIA director" (http://www.salon.com/news/1998/01/22news_kasi.html)