WASHINGTON – U.S. officials braced for a new wave of attacks on Americans in reprisal for last night’s execution of Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani gunman who went on a murderous rampage outside CIA headquarters nearly a decade ago.
Kasi, 38, died by lethal injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va., last night.
“There is no god but Allah,” Kasi said, softly chanting in his native tongue until he lost consciousness.
U.S. officials tightened security throughout the Washington area, and the State Department has issued warnings to Americans overseas, particularly in Pakistan, where radical Islamic groups have vowed retribution.
But Kasi, in recent media interviews, has called for calm, saying that innocent civilians “are not responsible for my execution and I am not encouraging attacks against anybody.”
Kasi was convicted of the cold-blooded killing of CIA analyst Frank Darling and CIA physician Lansing Bennett as they waited in a line of traffic outside the agency’s headquarters in McLean, Va., on Jan. 25, 1993.
Kasi fled to Pakistan and later to Afghanistan. FBI agents tracked him down four years later in a $3-a-night hotel room in Quetta, Pakistan, and he was flown back to the United States for trial.
A day after Kasi’s 1997 conviction, four American oil workers were murdered in Karachi, Pakistan, in what was widely believed to be retaliation for the trial.
Kasi expressed no remorse for the shootings, telling journalists he was motivated by his anger at U.S. foreign policy, “specifically, the pro-Israel policy, the anti-Muslim policy, the anti Palestinian policy.”