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| Executed Man Wanted Watch for Maine Pen Pal |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 11/25/2002 |
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In a letter received after he was executed, Pakistani Aimal Khan Kasi asks that a watch be purchased and sent to his pen pal in Maine. ''It's not expensive,'' he wrote. Kasi dated the letter to The Associated Press on Nov. 7, but it was not received until Nov. 20, six days after he was executed for killing two CIA employees during a shooting rampage outside the spy agency's headquarters. The letter was mailed Nov. 19 in Richmond. Neither Kasi's lawyer, Charles R. Burke, nor the Virginia Department of Corrections could account for the delay in mailing the letter. ''Hi,'' Kasi writes. ''This is the wrist watch (it's not expensive).'' He lists the brand of the watch, the model, the model number and two telephone numbers for the watch company, including a toll-free number. He writes in parenthesis: ''(Women watch).'' He then provides the name and address of his pen pal. She is 18-year-old Catherine Hull of Newcastle, Maine. The condemned man closed the letter: ''Thanks, Kasi.'' ''They were pen pals,'' Catherine's mother, Gretchen Hull, said by phone from Newcastle on Wednesday night. She said her daughter, a freshman at a college in Indiana, has received several letters from Kasi since he was executed. ''Everyday I go out to the mailbox there are more letters,'' Mrs. Hull said. She and her husband, Jonathan Hull, said their daughter declined to be interviewed because she is distraught over Kasi's death. ''She's had a very difficult time with this,'' Jonathan Hull said. The Hulls said Catherine began writing Kasi on Virginia's death row four years ago, when she was a freshman in high school. The Hulls are Quakers and oppose the death penalty. ''She was writing a paper ... on the death penalty,'' Mrs. Hull said. Catherine found Kasi's name on a Web site listing names of death row inmates seeking pen pals. Over the years, Kasi had his family in Pakistan send Catherine small gifts, Jonathan Hull said, and she got him a subscription to National Geographic magazine. ''It seems we have established a bond between the two families,'' Hull said. He said his daughter did not learn about Kasi's crimes until about two weeks before his execution, but ''we all knew he was on death row for doing something terrible.'' Catherine Hull held a Quaker meeting vigil for Kasi at her college on the night he was executed by injection at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, her father said. Kasi's letter about the watch will be forwarded to the Hulls in Maine. Kasi killed CIA communications worker Frank Darling, 28, and CIA analyst and physician Lansing Bennett, 66, as they sat in their cars at a stoplight in McLean. Three other men an engineer, an AT&T employee and a CIA analyst were wounded as Kasi walked along a row of stopped cars, shooting into them with a semiautomatic AK-47 rifle. He fled the country and spent most of the next 4 1/2 years hiding in and around the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. He was caught in a hotel while visiting Pakistan and was returned to the United States. Kasi confessed to the slayings during the return flight, saying he was angry over CIA meddling in Muslim nations. He was buried Tuesday before a crowd of thousands at his family's ancestral cemetery in Quetta, Pakistan. |
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