January 25: On This Day in World History … briefly
According to Qazi, he first thought of attacking CIA personnel after buying a Chinese-made AK-47 from a Chantilly gun store. The plan soon became 'more important than any other thing to him.'
1993: Five people are shot outside US CIA headquarters
On January 25, 1993, outside the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters campus in Langley, Virginia, Pakistani national Mir Qazi (also spelled as Kasi or Kansi) killed two CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a stoplight and wounded three others. Qazi fled the country and was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, sparking a four-year international manhunt. He was captured by a joint FBI-CIA/ISI task force in Pakistan in 1997 and rendered to the US to stand trial.
At around 8am on January 25, 1993, Qazi stopped a 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. Qazi emerged from his vehicle with an AK-47 type semi-automatic 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 Qazi shot the other people. According to a CIA release, ‘all the victims were full-time or contract employees with the agency.’ No other details were revealed.
During his later confession, Qazi said that he only stopped firing because ‘there wasn’t anybody else left to shoot’, and that he only shot male passengers because, as a Muslim, ‘it would be against (his) religion to shoot females’. He was surprised at the lack of an armed response: “I thought I will be arrested, or maybe killed in a shootout with CIA guards or police.” Qazi climbed back into his vehicle and drove to a nearby park. After 90 minutes of waiting, he realized that he was not being actively sought and drove back to his Reston apartment. He hid the rifle in a green plastic bag under a sofa, went to a McDonald’s to eat, and booked into a Days Inn for the night. He learned from CNN news reports that police had misidentified his vehicle and did not have his license plate number. The next morning, he took a flight to Quetta, Pakistan. Qazi stated his motive in a prison interview with CNN affiliate WTTG Fox 5: “I was real angry with the policy of the US government in the Middle East, particularly toward the Palestinian people.” He admitted shooting the victims, was found guilty of capital and first-degree murder, and was executed by lethal injection in 2002.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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