Pakistani-origin US national David Coleman Headley, nabbed by FBI on charges of plotting terror attacks on Indian facilities, had vowed to "retaliate against India" in one of his e-mail messages intercepted by investigators.

"We will retaliate against India," 49-year-old Headley wrote in the message, 'The New York Times' reported on Sunday.

Featuring the growth of Headley from his birth till being arrested by the FBI last month along with his school time friend Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a US-based Pakistan-born Canadian national, the daily said the indictment against him portrays a man who moved easily between different worlds.

"The profile that has emerged of him since his arrest, however, suggests that Mr Headley felt pulled between two cultures and ultimately gravitated toward an extremist Islamic one," the newspaper said.

"Some of us are saying that 'Terrorism' is the weapon of the cowardly," Headley wrote in an e-mail message to his high school classmates last February. "I will say that you may call it barbaric or immoral or cruel, but never cowardly."

He further said "courage is, by and large, exclusive to the Muslim nation."

His e-mail messages, including many that defended beheadings and suicide bombings as heroic, are among the evidence in the government's case against him and his co-conspirator, 48-year-old Rana, who runs businesses in Chicago, the daily said.

In recent days, the mainstream American media has written about the case of Rana-Headley; as to how US nationals and those living here are increasingly becoming indoctrinated by Islamic fundamentalism and planning terrorist attacks in countries like India and Denmark.

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