1993 shootings at CIA Headquarters

1993 CIA Headquarters shooting
Part of Terrorism in the United States
George Bush Center for Intelligence, near the site of the shooting
Location	Langley, Virginia, U.S.
Date	January 25, 1993 c. 8:00 am (EST)
Target	CIA employees
Attack type	Shooting
Weapons	Kalashnikov rifle
Deaths	2
Non-fatal injuries	3
Victims	Frank Darling and Lansing H. Bennett
Perpetrators	Mir Qazi
Motive	U.S. foreign policy in Muslim countries

On January 25, 1993, outside the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters campus in Langley, Virginia, a gunman killed two CIA employees and wounded three others. The perpetrator, later identified as Pakistani national Mir Qazi (also spelled as Kasi or Kansi), shot CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a stoplight.

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 United States to stand trial. He admitted that he shot the victims of the attack, was subsequently found guilty of capital and first-degree murder, and executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Mir Qazi (or Mir Aimal Kasi) was born in Quetta, Pakistan, either on February 10, 1964, or January 1, 1967. He entered the United States in 1991, taking a substantial sum of cash he had inherited on the death of his father in 1989. He travelled on forged papers he had purchased in Karachi, Pakistan, altering his last name to "Kansi", and later bought a fake green card in Miami. He stayed with a Kashmiri friend, Zahed Mir, in his Reston, Virginia, apartment, and invested in a courier firm for which he also worked as a driver. This 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 Kasi, 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]."