ON MONDAY, Jan 25, 1993, at 8am, a number of automobiles were stopped in two north-bound, left-turn lanes on Route 123 in Fairfax County at the main entrance to the headquarters of the CIA. The vehicle operators had stopped for a red traffic light and were waiting to turn into the entrance. At the same time, a lone gunman emerged from another vehicle, which he had stopped behind the automobiles. The gunman, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, proceeded to move among the automobiles firing the weapon into them.

Within a few seconds, Frank Darling and Lansing Bennett were killed and Nicholas Starr, Calvin Morgan, and Stephen Williams were wounded by the gunshots. All the victims were CIA employees and were operators of separate automobiles. The gunman was later identified as Mir Aimal Kasi, who was employed as a driver for a local courier service and was familiar with the area surrounding the CIA entrance.

The day after the shooting, he returned to Pakistan. Two days later, a resident of the apartment complex where Aimal Kasi was living, reported to the police that Kasi was a “missing person.”

On Feb 8, 1993, the police searched Kasi’s apartment and discovered the weapon used in the shootings, as well as other property. Kansi had purchased the weapon in Fairfax County three days before commission of the crime. On Feb 16, 1993, he was indicted for the offence arising from the events of Jan 25, 1993. Capital murder of Darling and Bennett, malicious woundings of Starr, Morgan, and Williams and five charges of using a firearm in commission of the foregoing felonies.

Nearly four-and-a-half years later, on June 15, 1997, at 4am, FBI agent Garrett and three other armed FBI agents, dressed in native clothing, apprehended Mir Aimal Kansi in a hotel room in Pakistan. Kansi responded to a knock on the room’s door and the FBI agents rushed inside. Kansi, who has a master’s degree in English, immediately began screaming in a different language and refused to identify himself. After a few minutes, he was subdued, handcuffed, and gagged. FBI agent Garrett identified him through the use of fingerprints. When the FBI agents left the hotel with Kansi in custody, he was hand-cuffed and shackled, and a hood had been placed over his head. He was transported in a vehicle for about an hour to board an airplane.

During the flight, FBI agent Garrett told Aimal Kansi that he was an FBI agent. The flight lasted a little over an hour. After the plane landed, Kansi was transferred to a vehicle and driven for about 40 minutes to a “holding facility” where he was turned over to Pakistan authorities. The FBI agents removed his handcuffs, shackles and hood when the group arrived at the holding facility, but the persons in charge of the facility put other handcuffs on him. Aimal Kansi was placed in one of the eight cells in the facility, where he remained until the morning of June 17, 1997.

During Kasi’s stay in the facility, the FBI agents never left his presence or allowed him to be interrogated. He was allowed to eat, drink, and sleep. On two occasions, the FBI agents removed Kasi from his cell to look at his back and his arm and to take his blood pressure and pulse.

On June 16, late in the day, FBI agent Garrett was advised by an official at the US embassy in Islamabad that Aimal Kasi would be released the next morning. On June 17 at 7am, Kasi was allowed to be released from the facility in the custody of the FBI agents. He was handcuffed, shackled, and hooded during a 15-minute ride to an airplane. Once on the plane, the hood was removed.

Shortly after boarding the aircraft, a physician checked Kasi’s well-being. During the 12-hour flight to Fairfax County, FBI agent Garrett first conducted a background conversation with Kasi, discussing his life in the United States — where he lived, where he worked. Garrett knew, from his four-and-a-half-years’ search that Aimal Kasi was a Pakistani national and was not a US citizen and he had not returned to the US after he fled on Jan 26, 1993.

After the background conversation, Garrett informed him of his rights. Kasi signed an FBI “Advice of Rights” form, after reading it and having it explained to him. He indicated he was waiving his rights and was willing to give a statement. The subsequent interview lasted about one- and-a-half-hours before Kasi signed a written statement summarizing the interview. In the written statement, he confirmed that he purchased the AK-47 rifle and about 150 rounds of ammunition several days before the incident.

He said he drove his pickup truck to the scene, got out of his vehicle and started shooting into vehicles stopped at a red light. Continuing, he stated: “I shot approximately 10 rounds, shooting five people. I aimed for the chest area of the people I shot. I then returned to my truck and drove back to my apartment.” He also stated that several days before the shooting he decided to do the shooting at the CIA or the Israeli embassy but decided to shoot at the CIA because it was easier because CIA officials are not armed.

As part of his oral statement to FBI agent Garrett, Aimal Kasi enumerated political reasons — why he wanted to do this shooting. He said he was upset because US aircraft had attacked parts of Iraq, he was upset with the CIA because of their involvement in Muslim countries.

When FBI agent Garrett asked him why he stopped shooting, he replied there wasn’t anybody else left to shoot. When asked about the gender of those shot, Kasi replied that he only shot males because it would be against his religion to shoot females. Following 15 pre-trial hearings, Aimal Kasi was tried by a single jury during 10 days in November 1997 upon his plea of not guilty of the indictment. The jury found Kasi guilty of all charges and, during the second phase of the bifurcated capital proceeding, fixed his punishment at death on grounds of the vileness predicate of the capital murder.

On Feb 4, 1998, after three post-trial hearings, during one of which the trial court considered a probation officer’s report, the court sentenced Kasi to death for the capital murder. Also, the court sentenced him to the punishment in accord with the jury’s verdict. For the first-degree murder of Darling and Bennett, life imprisonment and a $100,000 fine, for each of the malicious woundings, 20 years’ imprisonment and a $100,000 fine, and for the firearms charges, two years in prison for one charge and four years in prison for each of the remaining four charges.

Mir Aimal Kasi’s appeals were exhausted last month when the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his death sentence. Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert F. Horan said: “If he wasn’t a terrorist, I’ve got to get a new definition.” Four Americans were killed in Pakistan in apparent response to Kasi’s 1997 trial. “I’ve tried an awful lot of killers in my life, and I think he’s the only one I’ve run into that is absolutely proud of what he did. You get a lot of killers who don’t feel all that bad about what they did, but he’s proud of it”.

According to the Virginia Supreme Court, in one of his appeals, Kasi contended he should not be sentenced to death because his was a political crime and that his death sentence should be commuted “to avoid possible violent acts of reprisal.” On Sept 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Tower and Pentagon, a federal magistrate judge in Norfolk recommended that Kasi’s appeal be rejected.

One juror spoke to the press after the penalty phase of the trial. “I was literally shaking,” the juror said of the trial’s penalty deliberations. “I found it probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do because you are practically wielding the sword.”

The discussion over whether to convict Kasi was much less emotional, the juror said. And he said the case left him feeling sorry both for Kasi’s victims and for his family. “They’re not terrorists,” he said of relatives of Kasi who sat through the two-week trial in Fairfax County Circuit Court. “They’re victims, just like the other side.”