Aimal Kasi (born 10 February or 22 October 1964 – 14 November 2002) was a Pakistani national who was convicted of the 1993 shootings at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In the incident, Kasi shot and killed two CIA employees and wounded three others. He soon fled to Kandahar, Afghanistan, which later became a Taliban stronghold, and went into hiding for four years. While in Pakistan, he was caught and arrested by the FBI with help from Pakistani police forces. After being returned to the U.S., he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection in 2002.
Background
Kansi was an ethnic Pashtun born on either 10 February 1964 or 22 October 1964 or 1 January 1967 in Quetta, Pakistan. He entered the United States in 1991 under the name Mir Aimal Kansi and brought a substantial sum of cash which he had inherited in 1989 upon the death of his father. He traveled on forged papers that he had purchased in Karachi, Pakistan. He had altered his name to "Kansi" and later bought a fake US green card in Miami, Florida.
He stayed with a Kashmiri friend, Zahid Mir, in his Reston, Virginia apartment, and he worked for a courier service. That 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 Kansi, he first began to think of attacking CIA personnel after he bought a Chinese-made AK-47 from a Chantilly, Virginia gun store. The plan soon became "more important than any other thing to [him]."
Shootings
On 25 January 1993, Kansi stopped his 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. Kansi emerged from his vehicle with his semi-automatic Type 56 assault 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 Kansi shot the other victims.
Kansi returned to his vehicle and drove to a nearby park. After 90 minutes of waiting, he realized that he was not being actively sought; he then drove back to his Reston apartment. At the time, reports said police were looking for a white male in his twenties and that 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 himself into a Days Inn for the night. The CNN news reports he watched made it clear that police had misidentified his vehicle and did not have his license plate number. The next morning, he took a flight to Quetta, Pakistan. According to Kansi, he killed CIA employees because, "I was really angry with the policy of the U.S. government in the Middle East, particularly toward the Palestinian people," Kansi said in a prison interview with CNN affiliate WTTG.
On 16 February 1993, Kansi, then a fugitive, had been charged in absentia. The charges involved the capital murder of Darling, the murder of Bennett, and three counts of malicious wounding for the other victims, along with related firearms charges.
Arrest and rendition
In May 1997, an informant walked into the U.S. consulate in Karachi and claimed he could help lead them to Kansi. As proof, he showed a copy of a driver's license application made by Kansi under a false name but bearing his photograph. Apparently, the people who had been sheltering Kansi wanted the multimillion-dollar reward offer for his capture. Kansi 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."