Jury Asks Death Penalty in CIA Slaying

Virginia jurors, despite expressing fears for their own safety, ruled Friday that Mir Aimal Kasi should die by lethal injection for the murder of a CIA employee near the agency’s headquarters almost five years ago.

The ruling officially was no more than a recommendation, but Virginia judges usually accept such decisions by their juries. Judge J. Howe Brown Jr., who will announce the sentence Jan. 23, already has sentenced the 33-year-old Pakistani to life imprisonment for the murder of 66-year-old Lansing H. Bennett, a second CIA employee slain in the 1993 attack.

The jury was asked to deliberate over the sentence for Kasi in the murder of 28-year-old Frank Darling because the circumstances of the slaying made it a capital crime under Virginia law. Kasi first wounded Darling, then shot him in the head as Darling’s wife cowered beside him.

After reaching their guilty verdict, jurors sent a note to Brown expressing fear for their safety. The judge sequestered the jurors, and county officials took extensive security precautions around the courthouse in Fairfax, Va., just across the Potomac River from Washington.

Four American oil workers were slain in Karachi, Pakistan, after the jury found Kasi guilty of the murders of Darling and Brown on Monday. An organization calling itself the Aimal Secret Committee claimed responsibility for the attacks and threatened to kill more Americans if Kasi got the death penalty.

Despite its fears, the jury, made up of six men and six women, unanimously recommended the death sentence.

Kasi was convicted of killing Darling and Bennett and wounding three other CIA employees with a Chinese-made AK-47 assault rifle on Jan. 25, 1993, as they sat in their cars in rush-hour traffic near CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Kasi, who did not testify at his trial, made several confessions, according to witnesses, in which he said that he shot the CIA workers “to teach a lesson to the United States government” for its bombing of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

A few hours after the shootings, Kasi flew out of the United States and returned to his hometown of Quetta. After a four-year manhunt, FBI agents found him in a Pakistani hotel last June and took him to authorities in Virginia.

In the sentencing phase of the trial, the jury took seven hours over two days to reach its decision. Defense attorney Judith Barger had argued that the jury should rule out death for Kasi because he had suffered brain damage at or soon after birth.

This was derided by Robert F. Horan, the prosecutor, who painted Kasi as a killer with no remorse.

“He is proud of it,” Horan told the jury. “He set out on a mission to kill people and he accomplished it. It doesn’t bother him.”