Kansi, Mir Aimal (1964–2002)

In 1993, Mir Aimal Kansi (or Kasi), a Pakistani national, attacked the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, killing two people; he was executed in 2002.

Born in 1964 to a wealthy family in Quetta, Pakistan, Kansi inherited about $100,000 after his father's death. Reportedly involved in a militant nationalist group in Pakistan, Kansi traveled to the United States in 1991, entering the country on a business visa. On January 25, 1993, he stepped out of his car near the CIA gates in Langley. While morning commuters waited at a traffic light outside CIA headquarters, Kansi used an AK-47 assault rifle to shoot through car windows, walking between the lanes and spraying bullets left and right. He first shot Frank Darling, a 28-year-old CIA communications worker, in the back. Darling's wife, Judy Becker-Darling, also worked at the CIA and was riding to work with her husband. She crouched on the floor when Kansi returned to the car and shot Darling again. He also shot and killed Lansing Bennett, a 66-year-old CIA analyst and physician, and wounded three others.

Kansi fled to Pakistan the next day; he evaded capture for over four years. He spent much of that time in Afghanistan. At first, the U.S. government did not label the CIA killings an act of international terrorism, reportedly to minimize problems with Pakistan. Judy Becker-Darling publicly spoke about what she saw as the CIA's indifference to her husband's death, and she became a gun control activist. Originally, the government offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to Kansi's capture, later raising the amount to $2 million.

On June 17, 1997, Kansi was arrested in a Punjab hotel room and then extradited to the United States, where he was tried in Virginia. Prosecutors in his trial said that his actions aimed to protest and take revenge for U.S. involvement in Muslim countries. Kansi did not testify at his trial, but he wrote a series of letters to a reporter at http://Salon.com, explaining that he had intended to assassinate either CIA director James Woolsey or the former director Robert Gates.

The jury found Kansi guilty on November 10, 1997, and began deliberating their recommendation on his sentence. The next day, four auditors from the U.S. oil company Union Texas were shot, along with their Pakistani driver, in Karachi, Pakistan. Because the jury was still deliberating, they were sequestered to shield them from news of the Karachi shootings. The jury recommended the death penalty, and the judge sentenced Kansi to death on January 24, 1998.

Kansi was executed by lethal injection on November 14, 2002, in Virginia. Although he apologized to the families of the people he killed, he maintained that his attack on the CIA building was a legitimate response to U.S. policies toward the Muslim world. Following his death, Kansi's body was shipped to Pakistan for burial; the flight carrying his corpse was greeted by more than [Page 325]2,000 Pakistanis, many of them chanting anti-American slogans.