CIA Shooting Suspect Is Said to Confess

WASHINGTON — Mir Aimal Kansi, arrested in a dramatic FBI raid at a hotel in Pakistan, confessed to his captors that he was the gunman who went on a shooting spree outside CIA headquarters in 1993, killing two agency employees and wounding three other people, a senior law enforcement official said Thursday.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Kansi’s admissions were given to FBI agents escorting him back to the United States aboard a C-141 military cargo plane. Kansi also signed a statement admitting his actions, the official said.

The confession was made voluntarily and only after Kansi was advised of his right to remain silent under U.S. law, the official said.

Kansi, a 33-year-old Pakistani, is being held without bail in a jail in Fairfax County, Va., just outside Washington. He is facing two murder counts and other state criminal charges stemming from the CIA shooting.

Local prosecutors say they plan to seek the death penalty if Kansi is convicted.

Kansi’s reported confession recalled key details of the shooting, in which he allegedly walked down a line of cars stuck in rush-hour traffic on the morning of Jan. 25, 1993, outside the main entrance to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and began firing at motorists.

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According to the law enforcement official, he told the FBI agents that he fired off eight to 10 rounds from a semiautomatic Chinese weapon and then fled to a nearby park, where he waited for a few hours for the commotion caused by the attack to die down.

He said he returned to his apartment in Reston, Va., then left the United States the next day, bound for his native Pakistan.

The official said that although Kansi was surprisingly talkative on the flight back to the United States, his motive for the shooting spree remained unclear, except that he appeared to bear a grudge against the U.S. government for some perceived wrongs done to his family.

One legal source cautioned that Kansi’s statement could be challenged in court by defense lawyers during a future trial.

The grounds for such a challenge could come, for example, if his lawyers argued that Kansi was under duress or disoriented and fatigued by his capture and flight back to the United States, or that he didn’t fully understand his rights.

During a brief appearance in a Virginia state court Wednesday, Kansi was not represented by a lawyer and said he could not afford one, and so he may soon be assigned a public defender or another court-appointed attorney.

Kansi’s capture was the result of a secret joint operation by the CIA and the FBI, ending one of the most intensive international manhunts ever mounted by the U.S. government.

After CIA informants provided information about Kansi’s location and travel plans two or three weeks ago, an FBI hostage rescue team was sent into Pakistan to make the arrest.

According to accounts of the capture provided earlier this week by the government, at about 4 a.m. Sunday morning, team members knocked on Kansi’s hotel room door, and when he opened it, five agents burst through to take him into custody and hustle him away in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Kansi was held away from the eyes of local authorities until Tuesday’s flight into Washington’s Dulles International Airport.

The FBI has credited Afghan individuals for cooperating with the operation--perhaps by informing on Kansi, who had been living inside Afghanistan in recent years.

Pakistani intelligence agents also reportedly cooperated with the FBI in the operation. But Pakistan is apparently reluctant to expose its role in the operation out of fear of possible reprisals from Muslim extremists who had come to view Kansi as a hero.

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As a result, U.S. officials have refused to publicly acknowledge that the arrest took place in Pakistan.

But the Associated Press on Thursday provided details of Kansi’s arrest based on an account from a receptionist at a hotel in the Pakistani town of Dera Ghazi Khan, in the country’s eastern Punjab province.

The AP said two U.S. officials confirmed that the raid the receptionist described was the one in which Kansi was captured.

That would mean the arrest took place far from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the location that other U.S. officials had suggested earlier this week was where the raid occurred.