Aafia Siddiqui
Encyclopedia
Aafia Siddiqui is an American-educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist
who was convicted of assault with intent to murder her U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan
. The charges carried a maximum sentence of life in prison; in September 2010, she was sentenced by a United States district court
to 86 years in prison.
Siddiqui entered the United States on a student visa in 1990. Staying for both undergraduate and graduate education, she eventually settled in Massachusetts and earned her PhD in neuroscience from Brandeis University
in 2001. A devout Muslim
who had engaged in Islamic charity work, Siddiqui moved back to Pakistan in 2002. She disappeared with her three young children in March 2003, shortly after the arrest in Pakistan of her second husband's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the September 11 attacks. Khalid Mohammed reportedly mentioned Siddiqui's name while he was being interrogated, and shortly thereafter, she was added to the FBI Seeking Information – War on Terrorism list. In May 2004, the FBI named Siddiqui as one of its seven Most Wanted Terrorists
. Her whereabouts were reported to have been unknown for more than five years, until she was arrested in July 2008 in Afghanistan
. Upon her arrest, the Afghan police
said she was carrying in her purse handwritten notes and a computer thumb drive
containing recipes for conventional bombs and weapons of mass destruction
, instructions on how to make machines to shoot down U.S. drones
, descriptions of New York City landmarks with references to a mass casualty attack
, and two pounds of sodium cyanide
in a glass jar.
Siddiqui was shot and severely wounded at the police compound the following day. Her American interrogators said she grabbed an unattended rifle from behind a curtain and began shooting at them. Siddiqui’s own version was that she simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers one of whom then shot her. She received medical attention for her wounds at Bagram Air Base
and was flown to the U.S. to be charged in a New York City federal court with attempted murder
, and armed assault
on U.S. officers and employees. She denied the charges. After receiving psychological
evaluations and therapy
, the judge declared her mentally fit to stand trial. Siddiqui interrupted the trial proceedings with vocal outbursts and was ejected from the courtroom several times. The jury convicted her of all the charges in February 2010. The prosecution argued for "terrorism enhancement" of the charges that would require a life term; Siddiqui's lawyers requested a 12-year sentence, arguing that she was mentally ill. The charges against her stemmed solely from the shooting, and Siddiqui was not charged with, or prosecuted for, any terrorism
-related offenses.
Amnesty International
monitored the trial for fairness. Four British Parliamentarians
called the trial a grave miscarriage of justice which violated the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution
as well as the United States' obligations as a member of the United Nations, and demanded Siddiqui's release. In a letter to Barack Obama
, they stated that there was a lack of scientific and forensic evidence tying Siddiqui to the weapon she allegedly fired. Many of Siddiqui's supporters, including some international human rights organizations, have claimed that Siddiqui was not an extremist and that she and her young children were illegally detained, interrogated and tortured by Pakistani intelligence, U.S. authorities or both during her five-year disappearance. The U.S. and Pakistan governments have denied all such claims. In a 2010 audio-recorded testimony, the Sindh Province Police Superintendent confirmed his personal involvement in arresting and abducting Siddiqui and her three small children in March 2003. He said that local Karachi
authorities were involved, participating with Pakistani intelligence (ISI), CIA and FBI agents.
. Her sister, Fowzia, is a Harvard-trained neurologist
, who worked at Sinai Hospital
in Baltimore and taught at Johns Hopkins University
before she returned to Pakistan.
Siddiqui attended school in Zambia
until the age of eight, and finished her primary and secondary schooling in Karachi.
, on a student visa in 1990 joining her brother. She attended the University of Houston
for three semesters, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
after being awarded a full scholarship. In 1992, as a sophomore, Siddiqui received a Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal "Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women". As a junior, she received a $1,200 City Days fellowship through MIT's program to help clean up Cambridge elementary school playgrounds. While she initially had a triple major in biology, anthropology, and archeology at MIT, she graduated in 1995 with a B.S.
in biology.
She was regarded as religious by her fellow MIT students, but not unusually so: a student who lived in the dorm at the time said, "She was just nice and soft-spoken, [and not] terribly assertive."
She joined the Muslim Students' Association
(MSA), and a fellow Pakistani recalls her recruiting for association meetings and distributing pamphlets. Journalist Deborah Scroggins
suggested that through the MSA's contacts Siddiqui may have been drawn into the world of terrorism:
Siddiqui solicited money for the Al Kifah Refugee Center. In addition to being an al-Qaeda charitable front and al-Qaeda’s U.S operational headquarters, tied to bin Laden, it advocated armed violence, one of its affiliates, El Sayyid Nosair
, had just killed Rabbi Meir Kahane
in 1990, and it was tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
. Through the MSA she met several committed Islamists, including Suheil Laher, its imam
, who publicly advocated Islamization
and jihad
before 9/11. For a short time, Laher was also the head of the Islamic charity Care International (which had nothing to do with the eponymous aid organization), which reportedly collected funds for jihadist fighters.
When Pakistan asked the U.S. for help in 1995 in combating religious extremism, Siddiqui circulated the announcement with a scornful note deriding Pakistan for "officially" joining "the typical gang of our contemporary Muslim governments", closing her email with a quote from the Quran warning Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as friends. She wrote three guides for teaching Islam, expressing the hope in one: "that our humble effort continues ... and more and more people come to the [religion] of Allah until America becomes a Muslim land." She also took a 12-hour pistol training course at the Braintree Rifle and Pistol Club in Braintree, Massachusetts
.
, and then in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Roxbury, Boston, where he worked as an anesthesiologist
at Brigham and Women's Hospital
. She gave birth to a son, Muhammad Ahmed in 1996, and to a daughter, Mariam Bint-e Muhammad, in 1998; both are American citizens.
Siddiqui studied cognitive neuroscience
at Brandeis University
. In early 1999 while she was a graduate student, she taught General Biology Lab, a course required for undergraduate biology majors, pre-med, and pre-dental students. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 after completing her dissertation on learning through imitation; "Separating the Components of Imitation". Siddiqui's dissertation adviser was a Brandeis psychology professor who recalled that she wore a head scarf and thanked Allah when an experiment was successful. He said her research concerned how people learn, and did not believe it could be connected to anything that would be useful to Al-Qaeda
. Siddiqui also co-authored a journal article on selective learning that was published in 2003.
In 1999, while living in Boston, Siddiqui founded the Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching as a nonprofit organization. She served as the organization's president, her husband was the treasurer, and her sister was the resident agent
.On October 3, 2005, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the organization's charitable status, see Foundations Status of Certain Organizations, Internal Revenue Bulletin 2005–40, Announcement 25–67, October 3, 2005. She attended a mosque outside the city where she stored copies of the Quran and other Islamic literature for distribution. She also helped establish the Dawa Resource Center, a program that distributed Qurans and offered Islam-based advice to prison inmates.
in 2004, Siddiqui, using the alias Fahrem or Feriel Shahin, was one of six alleged al-Qaeda members who bought $19 million worth of blood diamonds in Monrovia, Liberia
, immediately prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks. The diamonds were purchased because they were untraceable assets to be used for funding al-Qaeda operations. The identification of Siddiqui was made three years after the incident by one of the go-betweens in the Liberian deal. Alan White, former chief investigator of the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Liberia, said she was the woman. Siddiqui's lawyer maintained credit card receipts and other records showed that she was in Boston at the time. FBI agent Dennis Lormel, who investigated terrorism financing, said the agency ruled out a specific claim that she had evaluated diamond operations in Liberia, though she remained suspected of money laundering
.
In the summer of 2001, the couple moved to Malden, Massachusetts
. According to Khan, after the September 11 attacks, Siddiqui insisted on leaving the U.S., saying that it was unsafe for them and their children to remain. He also said that she wanted him to move to Afghanistan
, and work as a medic for the mujahideen
.
In May 2002, the FBI questioned Siddiqui and her husband regarding their purchase over the internet of $10,000 worth of night vision equipment, body armor, and military manuals including The Anarchist's Arsenal, Fugitive, Advanced Fugitive, and How to Make C-4
. Khan claimed that these were for hunting and camping expeditions. On June 26, 2002, the couple and their children returned to Karachi.
In August 2002, Khan alleged Siddiqui was abusive
and manipulative throughout their seven years of marriage; her violent personality and extremist views led him to suspect her of involvement in jihad
i activities. Khan went to Siddiqui's parents' home, and announced his intention to divorce her and argued with her father. The latter died of a heart attack on August 15, 2002. In September 2002, Siddiqui gave birth to the last of their three children, Suleman. The couple's divorce was finalized on October 21, 2002.
Siddiqui left for the U.S. on December 25, 2002, informing her ex-husband that she was looking for a job; she returned on January 2, 2003. Amjad later said he was suspicious of her explanation, as universities were on winter break. The FBI linked her to an alleged al-Qaeda operative, Majid Khan, who they suspected of having planned attacks on gas stations and underground fuel-storage tanks in the Baltimore/Washington area. They said that the real purpose of her trip was to open a post office box, to make it appear that Majid was still in the U.S. Siddiqui listed Majid Khan as a co-owner of the P.O. box. The P.O. box key was later found in the possession of Uzair Paracha
, who was convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda, and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in 2006.
In February 2003, she married accused al-Qaeda member Ammar al-Baluchi, also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, in Karachi. Al Baluchi is a nephew of al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and a cousin of Ramzi Yousef
, convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Siddiqui's marriage to al-Baluchi was denied by her family, but confirmed by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence, a defense psychologist, and by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's family. She had worked with al-Baluchi in opening a P.O. box for Majid Khan, and says she married him in March or April 2003. Al-Baluchi was arrested on April 29, 2003, and taken to the Guantanamo Bay military prison; he faces the death penalty in his upcoming trial in the U.S., for aiding the 9/11 hijackers.
in Karachi, she emailed a former professor at Brandeis and expressed interest in working in the U.S., citing lack of options in Karachi for women of her academic background.
According to the media, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, alleged al-Qaeda chief planner of the September 11 attacks, was interrogated by the CIA after his arrest on March 1, 2003. Mohammed was tortured by waterboarding
183 times, and his resultant confessions triggered a series of related arrests shortly thereafter. The press reported Mohammed naming Siddiqui as an al-Qaeda operative; On March 25, 2003, the FBI issued a global "wanted for questioning" alert for Siddiqui and her ex-husband, Amjad Khan. Siddiqui was accused of being a "courier of blood diamonds and a financial fixer for al-Qaida". Khan was questioned by the FBI, and released.
Afraid the FBI would find her in Karachi, a few days later she left her parents' house along with her three children on March 30. She took a taxi to the airport, ostensibly to catch a morning flight to Islamabad
to visit her uncle, but disappeared.
Siddiqui's and her children's whereabouts and activities from March 2003 to July 2008 are a matter of dispute.
On April 1, 2003, local newspapers reported, and Pakistan interior ministry confirmed, that a woman had been taken into custody on terrorism charges. The Boston Globe described "sketchy" Pakistani news reports saying Pakistani authorities had detained Siddiqui, and had questioned her with FBI agents. However, a couple of days later, both the Pakistan government and the FBI publicly denied having anything to do with her disappearance. On April 21, 2003, a “senior U.S. law enforcement official” told Lisa Myers of NBC Nightly News that Siddiqui was in Pakistani custody. The same source retracted the statement the next day without explanation. On April 22, 2003, two U.S. federal law enforcement officials anonymously said Siddiqui had been taken into custody by Pakistani authorities. Pakistani officials never confirmed the arrest, however, and later that day the U.S. officials amended their earlier statements, saying new information made it "doubtful" she was in custody. Her sister Fauzia claimed Interior Minister Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat said that her sister had been released and would be returning home "shortly".
In 2003–04, the FBI and the Pakistani government said they did not know where Siddiqui was. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft
called her the most wanted woman in the world, an al-Qaeda "facilitator" who posed a "clear and present danger to the U.S." On May 26, 2004, the U.S. listed her among the seven "most wanted" al-Qaeda fugitives. One day before the announcement, The New York Times cited the Department of Homeland Security saying there were no current risks; American Democrats accused the Bush administration of attempting to divert attention from plummeting poll numbers and to push the failings of the Invasion of Iraq off the front pages.
According to her ex-husband, after the global alert for her was issued Siddiqui went into hiding, and worked for al-Qaeda. During her disappearance Khan said he saw her at Islamabad airport in April 2003, as she disembarked from a flight with their son, and said he helped Inter-Services Intelligence
identify her. He said he again saw her two years later, in a Karachi traffic jam.
Media reports Siddiqui having told the FBI that she worked at the Karachi Institute of Technology in 2005, was in Afghanistan in the winter of 2007; she stayed for a time during her disappearance in Quetta, Pakistan, and was sheltered by various people. According to an intelligence official in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, her son Ahmad, who was with her when she was arrested, said he and Siddiqui had worked in an office in Pakistan, collecting money for poor people. He told Afghan investigators that on August 14, 2008, they had traveled by road from Quetta, Pakistan, to Afghanistan. Amjad Khan, who unsuccessfully sought custody of his eldest son, Ahmad, said most of the claims of the family in the Pakistani media relating to her and their children were to garner public support and sympathy for her; he said they were one-sided and in mostly false. An Afghan intelligence official said he believes that Siddiqui was working with Jaish-e-Mohammed
(the "Army of Muhammad"), a Pakistani Islamic mujahedeen military group that fights in Kashmir
and Afghanistan.
Siddiqui's maternal uncle, Shams ul-Hassan Faruqi, said that on January 22, 2008, she visited him in Islamabad. He said that she told him she had been held by Pakistani agencies, and asked for his help in order to cross into Afghanistan, where she thought she would be safe in the hands of the Taliban. He had worked in Afghanistan, and made contact with the Taliban in 1999, but told her he was no longer in touch with them. He notified his sister, Siddiqui's mother, who came the next day to see her daughter. He said that Siddiqui stayed with them for two days. Her uncle has signed an affidavit swearing to these facts.
Ahmad and Siddiqui reappeared in 2008. Afghan authorities handed the boy over to Pakistan in September 2008, and he now lives with his aunt in Karachi, who has prohibited him from talking to the press. In April 2010, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik
said that a 12-year-old girl who was found outside a house in Karachi was identified by a DNA test as Siddiqui's daughter Mariyam, and that she had been returned to her family.
, Afghanistan
, detainees who say they believe a woman held at the prison while they were there was Siddiqui. Her sister said that Siddiqui had been raped, and tortured for five years. According to Islamic convert and former Taliban captive Yvonne Ridley
, Siddiqui spent those years in solitary confinement at Bagram as Prisoner 650. Six human rights groups, including Amnesty International
, listed her as possibly being a "ghost prisoner" held by the U.S. Siddiqui claimed that she had been kidnapped by U.S. intelligence and Pakistani intelligence.
Siddiqui has not explained clearly what happened to her two missing children. She alternated between saying that the two youngest children were dead, and that they were with her sister Fowzia, according to a psychiatric exam. She told one FBI agent that sometimes one has to take up a cause that is more important than one's children. Khan said he believed that the missing children were in Karachi, either with or in contact with Siddiqui's family, and not in U.S. detention. He said that they were seen in her sister's house in Karachi and in Islamabad
on several occasions since their alleged disappearance in 2003.
In April 2010, Mariam was found outside the family house wearing a collar with the address of the family home. She was said to be speaking English. A Pakistani ministry official said the girl was believed to have been held captive in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2010.
The U.S. government said it did not hold Siddiqui during that time period, and had no knowledge of her whereabouts from March 2003 until July 2008. The U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, Anne Patterson, categorically stated that Siddiqui had not been in U.S. custody "at any time" prior to July 2008. A U.S. Justice Department spokesman called the allegations "absolutely baseless and false", a CIA spokesman also denied that she had been detained by the U.S., and Gregory Sullivan, a State Department spokesman, said: "For several years, we have had no information regarding her whereabouts whatsoever. It is our belief that she ... has all this time been concealed from the public view by her own choosing." Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin said in 2008 that U.S. agencies had searched for evidence to support allegations that Siddiqui was detained in 2003, and held for years, but found "zero evidence" that she was abducted, kidnapped, raped or tortured. He added: "A more plausible inference is that she went into hiding because people around her started to get arrested, and at least two of those people ended up at Guantanamo Bay. According to some U.S. officials, she went underground after the FBI alert for her was issued, and was at large working on behalf of al-Qaeda. The Guardian
cited an anonymous senior Pakistani official suggesting an "invaluable asset" like Siddiqui may have been "flipped" — turned against militant sympathisers — by Pakistani or American intelligence.
Ahmed described Aafia driving a vehicle taking the family from Karachi to Islamabad, when it was overtaken by several vehicles, and he and his mother were taken into custody. He described the bloody body of his baby brother being left on the side of the road.
He said that he had been too afraid to ask his interrogators who they were, but that they included both Pakistanis and Americans. He described beatings when he was in U.S. custody.
Eventually, he said, he was sent to a conventional children's prison in Pakistan.
His statement does not describe how he and his mother came to be in Ghazni in 2008.
police officers outside the Ghazni governor's compound on the evening of July 17, 2008 in the city of Ghazni
. With two small bags at her side, crouching on the ground, she aroused the suspicion of a man who feared she might be concealing a bomb under the burqua that she was wearing. A shopkeeper noticed a woman in a burqa
drawing a map, which is suspicious in Afghanistan where women are generally illiterate. She was accompanied by a teenage boy about 12, whom she reportedly claimed was an orphan she had adopted. She said her name was Saliha, that she was from Multan
in Pakistan, and that the boy's name was Ali Hassan. Discovering that she did not speak either of Afghanistan's main dialects, Pashtu or Dari
, the officers regarded her as suspicious.
In a bag she was carrying, the police found that she had a number of documents written in Urdu
and English describing the creation of explosives, chemical weapons, Ebola
, dirty bomb
s, and radiological agents (which discussed mortality rates of certain of the weapons), and handwritten notes referring to a "mass casualty attack" that listed various U.S. locations and landmarks (including the Plum Island Animal Disease Center
, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the New York City subway system), according to her indictment. The Globe also mentioned one document about a 'theoretical' biological weapon that did not harm children. She also reportedly had documents detailing U.S. "military assets", excerpts from The Anarchist's Arsenal, a one-gigabyte digital media storage device that contained over 500 electronic documents (including correspondence referring to attacks by "cells", describing the U.S. as an enemy, and discussing recruitment of jihadists and training), maps of Ghazni and the provincial governor's compounds and the mosques he prayed in, and photos of Pakistani military people. Other notes described various ways to attack enemies, including by destroying reconnaissance drones
, using underwater bombs, and using gliders
.
She also had "numerous chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars", according to the later complaint against her, and about two pounds of sodium cyanide
, a highly toxic poison. The U.S. prosecutors later said that sodium cyanide is lethal even when ingested in small doses (even less than five milligrams), and various of the other chemicals she had can be used in explosives. Abdul Ghani, Ghazni's deputy police chief, said she later confessed that she intended to carry out a suicide attack against the provincial governor.
The officers arrested her, as she cursed them, and took her to a police station. She said that the boy found with her was her stepson, Ali Hasan; Siddiqui subsequently admitted he was her biological son, when DNA testing proved the boy to be Ahmed.
There are conflicting accounts of the events following her arrest which led to her being sent to the United States for trial. American authorities say that two FBI agents, a U.S. Army warrant officer, a U.S. Army captain, and their U.S. military interpreters arrived in Ghazni the following day, on July 18, to interview Siddiqui at the Afghan National Police facility where she was being held.
Then, she was said to have threatened them loudly in English, and yelled "Get the fuck out of here" and "May the blood of [unintelligible] be on your [head or hands]". The captain dove for cover to his left, as she yelled "Allah Akbar" and fired at least two shots at them, missing them.
An Afghan interpreter who was seated closest to her lunged, grabbed and pushed the rifle, and tried to wrest it from her. At that point the warrant officer returned fire with a 9-millimeter pistol, hitting her in the torso, and one of the interpreters managed to wrestle the rifle away from her. During the ensuing struggle she initially struck and kicked the officers, while shouting in English that she wanted to kill Americans, and then lost consciousness.
Siddiqui was taken to Bagram Air Base by helicopter in critical condition. When she arrived at the hospital she was rated at 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale
, but she underwent emergency surgery without complication. She was hospitalized at the Craig Theater Joint Hospital, and recovered over the next two weeks. Once she was in a stable condition, the Afghan government allowed the Americans to transport her to the United States for trial. The day after landing, Siddiqui was arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom on charges of attempted murder. Her three-person defense team was hired by the Pakistani embassy to supplement her two existing public defenders, but Siddiqui refused to cooperate with them.
, with assault with a deadly weapon, and with attempting to kill U.S. personnel. She was flown to New York on August 6, and indicted on September 3, 2008, on two counts of attempted murder of U.S. nationals, officers, and employees, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying and using a firearm, and three counts of assault on U.S. officers and employees.
Explaining why the U.S. may have chosen to charge her as they did, rather than for her alleged terrorism, Bruce Hoffman
, professor of security studies at Georgetown University, said the decision turned what might have been a potentially complex terrorism matter into a more straightforward case:
Siddiqui was provided care for her wound while incarcerated in the U.S. In September 2008, a prosecutor reported to the court that Siddiqui had refused to be examined by a female doctor, despite the doctor's extensive efforts. On September 9, 2008, she underwent a forced medical exam. In November 2008, forensic psychologist Dr. Leslie Powers reported that Siddiqui had been "reluctant to allow medical staff to treat her". Her last medical exam had indicated her external wounds no longer required medical dressing, and were healing well. A psychiatrist employed by the prosecutor to examine Siddiqui's competence to stand trial, Gregory B. Saathoff M.D., noted in a March 2009 report that Siddiqui frequently verbally and physically refused to allow the medical staff to check her vital signs and weight, attempted to refuse medical care once it was apparent that her wound had largely healed, and refused to take antibiotics. At the same time, Siddiqui claimed to her brother that when she needed medical treatment she did not get it, which Saathoff said he found no support for in his review of documents and interviews with medical and security personnel, nor in his interviews with Siddiqui.
Siddiqui's trial was subject to delays, the longest being six months in order to perform psychiatric evaluations. She had been given routine mental health check-ups ten times in August and six times in September.
She underwent three sets of psychological assessments before trial. Her first psychiatric evaluation diagnosed her with depressive psychosis, and her second evaluation, ordered by the court, revealed chronic depression. Leslie Powers initially determined Siddiqui mentally unfit to stand trial. After reviewing portions of FBI reports, however, she told the pre-trial judge she believed Siddiqui was faking mental illness.
In a third set of psychological assessments, more detailed than the previous two, three of four psychiatrists concluded that she was"malingering" (faking her symptoms of mental illness). One suggested that this was to prevent criminal prosecution, and to improve her chances of being returned to Pakistan. In April 2009, Manhattan federal judge Richard Berman
held that she "may have some mental health issues" but was competent to stand trial.
-tested, and excluded from the jury at her trial:
Prior to her trial, Siddiqui said she was innocent of all charges. She maintained she could prove she was innocent, but refused to do so in court. On January 11, 2010, Siddiqui told the Judge that she would not cooperate with her attorneys, and wanted to fire them. She also said she did not trust the Judge, and added, “I’m boycotting the trial, just to let all of you know. There’s too many injustices." She then put her head down on the defense table as the prosecution proceeded.
on January 19, 2010. Prior to the jury entering the courtroom, Siddiqui told onlookers that she would not work with her lawyers because the trial was a sham. She also said: "I have information about attacks, more than 9/11! ... I want to help the President to end this group, to finish them... They are a domestic, U.S. group; they are not Muslim."
Nine government witnesses were called by the prosecution: Army Captain Robert Snyder, John Threadcraft, a former army officer, and FBI agent John Jefferson testified first. As Snyder testified that Siddiqui had been arrested with a handwritten note outlining plans to attack various U.S. sites, she interjected: "Since I'll never get a chance to speak... If you were in a secret prison... or your children were tortured... Give me a little credit, this is not a list of targets against New York. I was never planning to bomb it. You're lying." The court also heard from FBI agent John Jefferson and Ahmed Gul, an army interpreter, who recounted their struggle with her.
The judge allowed the jury to hear about her target list and other handwritten notes, but not about the chemicals and mass-produced documents from "how-to" terror manuals, or about Siddiqui's alleged ties to al-Qaeda because they could have created an inappropriate bias.
The defense said there was no forensic evidence that the rifle was fired in the interrogation room. They noted the nine government witnesses offered conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were positioned and how many shots were fired. It said it her handbag contents were not credible as evidence because they were sloppily handled. According to the Associated Press of Pakistan, Carlo Rosati, an FBI firearms expert witness in the federal court doubted whether the M-4 rifle was ever fired at the crime scene.; an FBI agent testified that Siddiqui's fingerprint
s were not found on the rifle. The prosecution argued that it was not unusual to fail to get fingerprints off a gun. "This is a crime that was committed in a war zone, a chaotic and uncontrolled environment 6,000 miles away from here." Gul's testimony appeared, according to the defense, to differ from that given by Snyder with regard to whether Siddiqui was standing or on her knees as she fired the rifle. When Siddiqui testified, though she admitted trying to escape, she denied that she had grabbed the rifle and said she had been tortured in secret prisons before her arrest by a “group of people pretending to be Americans, doing bad things in America’s name.”
During the trial, Siddiqui was removed from the court several times for repeatedly interrupting the proceedings with shouting; on being ejected, she was told by the judge that she could watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television in an adjacent holding cell. A request by the defense lawyers to declare a mistrial was turned down by the judge.
The trial lasted 14 days, with the jury deliberating for three days before reaching a verdict. On February 3, 2010, she was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder, armed assault, using and carrying a firearm, and three counts of assault on U.S. officers and employees. After jurors found Siddiqui guilty, she exclaimed: "This is a verdict coming from Israel, not America. That’s where the anger belongs."
She faced a minimum sentence of 30 years and a maximum of life in prison on the firearm charge, and could also have received a sentence of up to 20 years for each attempted murder and armed assault charge, and up to 8 years on each of the remaining assault counts. Her lawyers requested a 12-year sentence, instead of the life sentence recommended by the probation office. They argued that mental illness drove her actions when she attempted to escape from the Afghan National Police station "by any means available ... what she viewed as a horrific fate". Her lawyers also claimed her mental illness was on display during her trial outbursts and boycotts, and that she was "first and foremost" the victim of her own irrational behavior. The sentencing hearing set to take place on May 6, 2010, was rescheduled for mid-August 2010, and then September 2010.
A New York Times reporter wrote that at times during the hearing Judge Berman seemed to be speaking to an audience beyond the courtroom in an apparent attempt to address widespread speculation about Ms. Siddiqui and her case.
He gave as an example a reference to the five-year period before her 2008 arrest of Ms. Siddiqui’s disappearance and claims of torture, where the Judge said: "I am aware of no evidence in the record to substantiate these allegations or to establish them as fact. There is no credible evidence in the record that the United States officials and/or agencies detained Dr. Siddiqui".
At the time of sentencing Siddiqui didn't show any interest in filing an appeal, instead saying "I appeal to God, and He hears me." After she was sentenced, Siddiqui urged forgiveness and asked the public not to take any action in retaliation.
#90279-054) was originally held at Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn
. She is now being held in Federal Medical Center, Carswell
in Fort Worth, Texas
.
activist Cindy Sheehan
, criticised the conviction and the judicial process saying it was carried out by a kangaroo court
, with the judge displaying an "open bias" and the trial was unjust.
, whom they have held since June 2009, in retaliation for Siddiqui's conviction. A Taliban spokesperson claimed that members of Siddiqui's family had requested help from the Taliban to obtain her release from prison in the U.S.
In September 2010 the Taliban kidnapped Linda Norgrove, a Scottish aid worker in Afghanistan, and Taliban commanders insisted Norgrove would be handed over only in exchange for Siddiqui.
On October 8, 2010, Norgrove was accidentally killed during a rescue attempt by a grenade thrown by one of her rescuers.
A speaker for the Taliban, Waliur Rehman, announced that they wanted to swap Siddiqui for two Swiss citizens abducted in Balochistan
.
A petition was filed seeking action against the Pakistani government for it having not approached the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) to have Siddiqui released from the United States. Barrister Javed Iqbal Jaffree said the CIA arrested Siddiqui in Karachi in 2003, and one of her sons was killed during her arrest. On January 21, 2010, Jaffree submitted documents allegedly proving the arrest to the Lahore High Court
.
In Pakistan, Siddiqui's February 2010 conviction was followed with expressions of support by many Pakistanis, who appeared increasingly anti-American
, as well as by politicians and the news media, who characterized her as a symbol of victimization by the United States. Her ex-husband, Amjad Khan, was one of the few who expressed a different view, saying that Siddiqui was "reaping the fruit of her own decision. Her family has been portraying Aafia as a victim. We would like the truth to come out."
After Siddiqui's conviction, she sent a message through her lawyer, saying that she does not want "violent protests or violent reprisals in Pakistan over this verdict." Thousands of students, political and social activists protested in Pakistan. Some shouted anti-American slogans, while burning the American flag and effigies of President Barack Obama
in the streets (see also: anti-Americanism in Pakistan
). Her sister has spoken frequently and passionately on her behalf at rallies. Echoing her family's comments, and anti-U.S. sentiment, many believe she was picked up in Karachi in 2003, detained at the U.S. Bagram Airbase, raped and tortured, and that the charges against her were fabricated.
The Pakistani Embassy in Washington, DC, expressed its dismay over the verdict, which followed "intense diplomatic and legal efforts on her behalf. [We] will consult the family of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and the team of defense lawyers to determine the future course of action." Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani described Siddiqui as a “daughter of the nation,” and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif
promised to push for her release. On February 18, President Asif Ali Zardari
requested of Richard Holbrooke
, U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. consider repatriating Siddiqui to Pakistan under the Pakistan-U.S. Prisoner Exchange Agreement. On February 22, the Pakistani Senate passed a resolution expressing its grave concern over Siddiqui's sentence, and demanding that the government take effective steps including diplomatic measures to secure her immediate release.
Shireen Mazari, editor of the Pakistani newspaper The Nation, wrote that the verdict "did not really surprise anyone familiar with the vindictive mindset of the U.S. public post-9/11". Foreign Policy
reported that rumors about her alleged sexual abuse
by captors, fuelled by constant stories in the Pakistani press, had made her a folk hero, and "become part of the legend that surrounds her, so much so that they are repeated as established facts by her supporters, who have helped build her iconic status".
Steve Inskeep
of National Public Radio noted on March 1 that while when Siddiqui's case has been covered in the U.S., it has mostly been described as a straightforward case of terrorism, in contrast when "the Pakistani media described this very same woman, this very same case, the assumptions are all very different". The News International
, Pakistan's largest circulation English tabloid, carried a March 3 letter from Talat Farooq
, the executive editor of the magazine Criterion in Islamabad, in which she wrote:
A New York Times article reviewing the Pakistani reaction noted: "All of this has taken place with little national soul-searching about the contradictory and frequently damning circumstances surrounding Ms. Siddiqui, who is suspected of having had links to Al Qaeda and the banned jihadi group Jaish-e-Muhammad. Instead, the Pakistani news media have broadly portrayed her trial as a “farce”, and an example of the injustices meted out to Muslims by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001."
Jessica Eve Stern, a terrorism specialist and lecturer at Harvard Law School
, observed: "Whatever the truth is, this case is of great political importance because of how people [in Pakistan] view her."
In September 2010, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik
sent a letter to the United States Attorney General calling for repatriation of Siddiqui to Pakistan. He said that the case of Siddiqui had become a matter of public concern in Pakistan and her repatriation would create goodwill for the U.S.
On September 27, 2010 the MQM
announced that it would take out a procession the next day "to condemn the sentence awarded to Dr Aafia Siddiqui in the United States."
, CIA contractor in Pakistan and US consulate employee, on Jan 27th 2011 had said they are ready to withdraw the murder case filed against him if the US authorities allow Siddiqui to return to Pakistan as a free citizen. However, both the families backed out afterwards and agreed to drop the case (according to Al Jazeera
, under some pressure from the Pakistani government) in return for accepting payment of up to 3 million USD as diyya
or blood money
as specified by Islamic Sharia
tradition; Davis was later released by Pakistan and went back to the US.
Court documents posted by the NEFA Foundation
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
who was convicted of assault with intent to murder her U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
. The charges carried a maximum sentence of life in prison; in September 2010, she was sentenced by a United States district court
United States district court
The United States district courts are the general trial courts of the United States federal court system. Both civil and criminal cases are filed in the district court, which is a court of law, equity, and admiralty. There is a United States bankruptcy court associated with each United States...
to 86 years in prison.
Siddiqui entered the United States on a student visa in 1990. Staying for both undergraduate and graduate education, she eventually settled in Massachusetts and earned her PhD in neuroscience from Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
in 2001. A devout Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
who had engaged in Islamic charity work, Siddiqui moved back to Pakistan in 2002. She disappeared with her three young children in March 2003, shortly after the arrest in Pakistan of her second husband's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the September 11 attacks. Khalid Mohammed reportedly mentioned Siddiqui's name while he was being interrogated, and shortly thereafter, she was added to the FBI Seeking Information – War on Terrorism list. In May 2004, the FBI named Siddiqui as one of its seven Most Wanted Terrorists
FBI Most Wanted Terrorists
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Most Wanted Terrorists is a list of fugitives who have been indicted by sitting Federal grand juries in the United States district courts, for alleged crimes of terrorism. The initial list was formed in late 2001 in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks...
. Her whereabouts were reported to have been unknown for more than five years, until she was arrested in July 2008 in Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
. Upon her arrest, the Afghan police
Afghan National Police
The Afghan National Police - ANP - is the primary national police force in Afghanistan. It serves as a single law enforcement agency all across the country. The Afghan police force was first created with the establishment of the Afghan nation in the early 18th century...
said she was carrying in her purse handwritten notes and a computer thumb drive
USB flash drive
A flash drive is a data storage device that consists of flash memory with an integrated Universal Serial Bus interface. flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, and physically much smaller than a floppy disk. Most weigh less than 30 g...
containing recipes for conventional bombs and weapons of mass destruction
Weapons of mass destruction
A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...
, instructions on how to make machines to shoot down U.S. drones
Unmanned aerial vehicle
An unmanned aerial vehicle , also known as a unmanned aircraft system , remotely piloted aircraft or unmanned aircraft, is a machine which functions either by the remote control of a navigator or pilot or autonomously, that is, as a self-directing entity...
, descriptions of New York City landmarks with references to a mass casualty attack
Mass-casualty incident
A mass casualty incident is any incident in which emergency medical services resources, such as personnel and equipment, are overwhelmed by the number and severity of casualties...
, and two pounds of sodium cyanide
Sodium cyanide
Sodium cyanide is an inorganic compound with the formula NaCN. This highly toxic colorless salt is used mainly in gold mining but has other niche applications...
in a glass jar.
Siddiqui was shot and severely wounded at the police compound the following day. Her American interrogators said she grabbed an unattended rifle from behind a curtain and began shooting at them. Siddiqui’s own version was that she simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers one of whom then shot her. She received medical attention for her wounds at Bagram Air Base
Bagram Air Base
Bagram Airfield, also referred to as Bagram Air Base, is a militarized airport and housing complex that is located next to the ancient city of Bagram, southeast of Charikar in Parwan province of Afghanistan. The base is run by a US Army division headed by a major general. A large part of the base,...
and was flown to the U.S. to be charged in a New York City federal court with attempted murder
Attempted murder
Attempted murder is a crime in England and Wales and Northern Ireland.-Today:In English criminal law, attempted murder is the crime of more than merely preparing to commit unlawful killing and at the same time having a specific intention to cause the death of human being under the Queen's Peace...
, and armed assault
Assault
In law, assault is a crime causing a victim to fear violence. The term is often confused with battery, which involves physical contact. The specific meaning of assault varies between countries, but can refer to an act that causes another to apprehend immediate and personal violence, or in the more...
on U.S. officers and employees. She denied the charges. After receiving psychological
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
evaluations and therapy
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy is a general term referring to any form of therapeutic interaction or treatment contracted between a trained professional and a client or patient; family, couple or group...
, the judge declared her mentally fit to stand trial. Siddiqui interrupted the trial proceedings with vocal outbursts and was ejected from the courtroom several times. The jury convicted her of all the charges in February 2010. The prosecution argued for "terrorism enhancement" of the charges that would require a life term; Siddiqui's lawyers requested a 12-year sentence, arguing that she was mentally ill. The charges against her stemmed solely from the shooting, and Siddiqui was not charged with, or prosecuted for, any terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
-related offenses.
Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
monitored the trial for fairness. Four British Parliamentarians
Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom, British Crown dependencies and British overseas territories, located in London...
called the trial a grave miscarriage of justice which violated the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights which sets forth rights related to criminal prosecutions...
as well as the United States' obligations as a member of the United Nations, and demanded Siddiqui's release. In a letter to Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
, they stated that there was a lack of scientific and forensic evidence tying Siddiqui to the weapon she allegedly fired. Many of Siddiqui's supporters, including some international human rights organizations, have claimed that Siddiqui was not an extremist and that she and her young children were illegally detained, interrogated and tortured by Pakistani intelligence, U.S. authorities or both during her five-year disappearance. The U.S. and Pakistan governments have denied all such claims. In a 2010 audio-recorded testimony, the Sindh Province Police Superintendent confirmed his personal involvement in arresting and abducting Siddiqui and her three small children in March 2003. He said that local Karachi
Karachi
Karachi is the largest city, main seaport and the main financial centre of Pakistan, as well as the capital of the province of Sindh. The city has an estimated population of 13 to 15 million, while the total metropolitan area has a population of over 18 million...
authorities were involved, participating with Pakistani intelligence (ISI), CIA and FBI agents.
Family and early life
Siddiqui was born in Karachi, Pakistan to Muhammad Salay Siddiqui, a British-trained neurosurgeon, who is now deceased, and Ismet (née Faroochi), an Islamic teacher, social worker, and charity volunteer, who is now retired. She belongs to Urdu speaking community of karachi. Her mother was prominent in political and religious circles and at one time a member of Pakistan's parliament. Siddiqui is the youngest of three siblings. Her brother is an architect who lives in TexasTexas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
. Her sister, Fowzia, is a Harvard-trained neurologist
Neurologist
A neurologist is a physician who specializes in neurology, and is trained to investigate, or diagnose and treat neurological disorders.Neurology is the medical specialty related to the human nervous system. The nervous system encompasses the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves. A specialist...
, who worked at Sinai Hospital
Sinai Hospital
LifeBridge Health is a Baltimore area corporation operating several medical institutions. These most notably include Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Northwest Hospital , and various nursing homes and medical office complexes.-Sinai Hospital:Sinai Hospital is a Baltimore, Maryland hospital originally...
in Baltimore and taught at Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
before she returned to Pakistan.
Siddiqui attended school in Zambia
Zambia
Zambia , officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west....
until the age of eight, and finished her primary and secondary schooling in Karachi.
Undergraduate education
Siddiqui moved to Houston, TexasHouston, Texas
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States, and the largest city in the state of Texas. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city had a population of 2.1 million people within an area of . Houston is the seat of Harris County and the economic center of , which is the ...
, on a student visa in 1990 joining her brother. She attended the University of Houston
University of Houston
The University of Houston is a state research university, and is the flagship institution of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1927, it is Texas's third-largest university with nearly 40,000 students. Its campus spans 667 acres in southeast Houston, and was known as University of...
for three semesters, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
after being awarded a full scholarship. In 1992, as a sophomore, Siddiqui received a Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal "Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women". As a junior, she received a $1,200 City Days fellowship through MIT's program to help clean up Cambridge elementary school playgrounds. While she initially had a triple major in biology, anthropology, and archeology at MIT, she graduated in 1995 with a B.S.
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
in biology.
She was regarded as religious by her fellow MIT students, but not unusually so: a student who lived in the dorm at the time said, "She was just nice and soft-spoken, [and not] terribly assertive."
She joined the Muslim Students' Association
Muslim Students' Association
The Muslim Students Association, or Muslim Student Union, of the U.S. and Canada, also known as MSA National, is a religious organization dedicated to establishing and maintaining Islamic societies on college campuses in Canada and the United States. It serves to provide coordination and support...
(MSA), and a fellow Pakistani recalls her recruiting for association meetings and distributing pamphlets. Journalist Deborah Scroggins
Deborah Scroggins
Deborah Scroggins is an American journalist and author. A graduate of Tulane University and Columbia University, she was a reporter and editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1987 to 1998...
suggested that through the MSA's contacts Siddiqui may have been drawn into the world of terrorism:
At MIT, several of the MSA's most active members had fallen under the spell of Abdullah Azzam, a Muslim Brother who was Osama bin LadenOsama bin LadenOsama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
's mentor.... [Azzam] had established the Al Kifah Refugee CenterAl Kifah Refugee CenterThe Al Kifah Refugee Center is a charity that was active in the United Statesand was based in the Faruq Mosque in Brooklyn.-Overview:Al Kifah Refugee Center had clandestine links to forces fighting in Afghanistan dating to the late 1980s, when the fighters enjoyed American support in their struggle...
[Brooklyn, New York] to function as its worldwide recruiting post, propaganda office, and fund-raising center for the mujahideenMujahideenMujahideen are Muslims who struggle in the path of God. The word is from the same Arabic triliteral as jihad .Mujahideen is also transliterated from Arabic as mujahedin, mujahedeen, mudžahedin, mudžahidin, mujahidīn, mujaheddīn and more.-Origin of the concept:The beginnings of Jihad are traced...
fighting in Afghanistan... It would become the nucleus of the al-Qaeda organization.
Siddiqui solicited money for the Al Kifah Refugee Center. In addition to being an al-Qaeda charitable front and al-Qaeda’s U.S operational headquarters, tied to bin Laden, it advocated armed violence, one of its affiliates, El Sayyid Nosair
El Sayyid Nosair
El Sayyid Nosair is an Egyptian-born American citizen, convicted of involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing...
, had just killed Rabbi Meir Kahane
Meir Kahane
Martin David Kahane , also known as Meir Kahane , was an American-Israeli rabbi and ultra-nationalist writer and political figure. He was an ordained Orthodox rabbi and later served as a member of the Israeli Knesset...
in 1990, and it was tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
1993 World Trade Center bombing
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 lb urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower into the South Tower , bringing...
. Through the MSA she met several committed Islamists, including Suheil Laher, its imam
Imam
An imam is an Islamic leadership position, often the worship leader of a mosque and the Muslim community. Similar to spiritual leaders, the imam is the one who leads Islamic worship services. More often, the community turns to the mosque imam if they have a religious question...
, who publicly advocated Islamization
Islamization
Islamization or Islamification has been used to describe the process of a society's conversion to the religion of Islam...
and jihad
Jihad
Jihad , an Islamic term, is a religious duty of Muslims. In Arabic, the word jihād translates as a noun meaning "struggle". Jihad appears 41 times in the Quran and frequently in the idiomatic expression "striving in the way of God ". A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid; the plural is...
before 9/11. For a short time, Laher was also the head of the Islamic charity Care International (which had nothing to do with the eponymous aid organization), which reportedly collected funds for jihadist fighters.
When Pakistan asked the U.S. for help in 1995 in combating religious extremism, Siddiqui circulated the announcement with a scornful note deriding Pakistan for "officially" joining "the typical gang of our contemporary Muslim governments", closing her email with a quote from the Quran warning Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as friends. She wrote three guides for teaching Islam, expressing the hope in one: "that our humble effort continues ... and more and more people come to the [religion] of Allah until America becomes a Muslim land." She also took a 12-hour pistol training course at the Braintree Rifle and Pistol Club in Braintree, Massachusetts
Braintree, Massachusetts
The Town of Braintree is a suburban city in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. Although officially known as a town, Braintree adopted a municipal charter, effective 2008, with a mayor-council form of government and is considered a city under Massachusetts law. The population was 35,744...
.
Marriage, graduate school, and work
In 1995 she had an arranged marriage to anesthesiologist Amjad Mohammed Khan from Karachi, just out of medical school, whom she had never seen. The marriage ceremony was conducted over the telephone. Khan then came to the U.S., and the couple lived first in Lexington, MassachusettsLexington, Massachusetts
Lexington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 31,399 at the 2010 census. This town is famous for being the site of the first shot of the American Revolution, in the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775.- History :...
, and then in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Roxbury, Boston, where he worked as an anesthesiologist
Anesthesiologist
An anesthesiologist or anaesthetist is a physician trained in anesthesia and peri-operative medicine....
at Brigham and Women's Hospital
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Brigham and Women's Hospital is the largest hospital of the Longwood Medical and Academic Area in Boston, Massachusetts. It is directly adjacent to Harvard Medical School of which it is the second largest teaching affiliate with 793 beds...
. She gave birth to a son, Muhammad Ahmed in 1996, and to a daughter, Mariam Bint-e Muhammad, in 1998; both are American citizens.
Siddiqui studied cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
at Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
. In early 1999 while she was a graduate student, she taught General Biology Lab, a course required for undergraduate biology majors, pre-med, and pre-dental students. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 after completing her dissertation on learning through imitation; "Separating the Components of Imitation". Siddiqui's dissertation adviser was a Brandeis psychology professor who recalled that she wore a head scarf and thanked Allah when an experiment was successful. He said her research concerned how people learn, and did not believe it could be connected to anything that would be useful to Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...
. Siddiqui also co-authored a journal article on selective learning that was published in 2003.
In 1999, while living in Boston, Siddiqui founded the Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching as a nonprofit organization. She served as the organization's president, her husband was the treasurer, and her sister was the resident agent
Registered Agent
A registered agent, also known as a resident agent or statutory agent, in United States business law, is a business or individual designated to receive service of process when a business entity is a party in a legal action such as a lawsuit or summons...
.On October 3, 2005, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the organization's charitable status, see Foundations Status of Certain Organizations, Internal Revenue Bulletin 2005–40, Announcement 25–67, October 3, 2005. She attended a mosque outside the city where she stored copies of the Quran and other Islamic literature for distribution. She also helped establish the Dawa Resource Center, a program that distributed Qurans and offered Islam-based advice to prison inmates.
Divorce, al-Qaeda allegations, and re-marriage
According to a dossier prepared by UN investigators for the 9/11 Commission9/11 Commission
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, was set up on November 27, 2002, "to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks", including preparedness for and the immediate response to...
in 2004, Siddiqui, using the alias Fahrem or Feriel Shahin, was one of six alleged al-Qaeda members who bought $19 million worth of blood diamonds in Monrovia, Liberia
Liberia
Liberia , officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Sierra Leone on the west, Guinea on the north and Côte d'Ivoire on the east. Liberia's coastline is composed of mostly mangrove forests while the more sparsely populated inland consists of forests that open...
, immediately prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks. The diamonds were purchased because they were untraceable assets to be used for funding al-Qaeda operations. The identification of Siddiqui was made three years after the incident by one of the go-betweens in the Liberian deal. Alan White, former chief investigator of the U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal in Liberia, said she was the woman. Siddiqui's lawyer maintained credit card receipts and other records showed that she was in Boston at the time. FBI agent Dennis Lormel, who investigated terrorism financing, said the agency ruled out a specific claim that she had evaluated diamond operations in Liberia, though she remained suspected of money laundering
Money laundering
Money laundering is the process of disguising illegal sources of money so that it looks like it came from legal sources. The methods by which money may be laundered are varied and can range in sophistication. Many regulatory and governmental authorities quote estimates each year for the amount...
.
In the summer of 2001, the couple moved to Malden, Massachusetts
Malden, Massachusetts
Malden is a suburban city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 59,450 at the 2010 census. In 2009 Malden was ranked as the "Best Place to Raise Your Kids" in Massachusetts by Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine.-History:...
. According to Khan, after the September 11 attacks, Siddiqui insisted on leaving the U.S., saying that it was unsafe for them and their children to remain. He also said that she wanted him to move to Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
, and work as a medic for the mujahideen
Mujahideen
Mujahideen are Muslims who struggle in the path of God. The word is from the same Arabic triliteral as jihad .Mujahideen is also transliterated from Arabic as mujahedin, mujahedeen, mudžahedin, mudžahidin, mujahidīn, mujaheddīn and more.-Origin of the concept:The beginnings of Jihad are traced...
.
In May 2002, the FBI questioned Siddiqui and her husband regarding their purchase over the internet of $10,000 worth of night vision equipment, body armor, and military manuals including The Anarchist's Arsenal, Fugitive, Advanced Fugitive, and How to Make C-4
C-4 (explosive)
C4 or Composition C4 is a common variety of the plastic explosive known as Composition C.-Composition and manufacture:C4 is made up of explosives, plastic binder, plasticizer and usually marker or odorizing taggant chemicals such as 2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane to help detect the explosive and...
. Khan claimed that these were for hunting and camping expeditions. On June 26, 2002, the couple and their children returned to Karachi.
In August 2002, Khan alleged Siddiqui was abusive
Domestic violence
Domestic violence, also known as domestic abuse, spousal abuse, battering, family violence, and intimate partner violence , is broadly defined as a pattern of abusive behaviors by one or both partners in an intimate relationship such as marriage, dating, family, or cohabitation...
and manipulative throughout their seven years of marriage; her violent personality and extremist views led him to suspect her of involvement in jihad
Jihad
Jihad , an Islamic term, is a religious duty of Muslims. In Arabic, the word jihād translates as a noun meaning "struggle". Jihad appears 41 times in the Quran and frequently in the idiomatic expression "striving in the way of God ". A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid; the plural is...
i activities. Khan went to Siddiqui's parents' home, and announced his intention to divorce her and argued with her father. The latter died of a heart attack on August 15, 2002. In September 2002, Siddiqui gave birth to the last of their three children, Suleman. The couple's divorce was finalized on October 21, 2002.
Siddiqui left for the U.S. on December 25, 2002, informing her ex-husband that she was looking for a job; she returned on January 2, 2003. Amjad later said he was suspicious of her explanation, as universities were on winter break. The FBI linked her to an alleged al-Qaeda operative, Majid Khan, who they suspected of having planned attacks on gas stations and underground fuel-storage tanks in the Baltimore/Washington area. They said that the real purpose of her trip was to open a post office box, to make it appear that Majid was still in the U.S. Siddiqui listed Majid Khan as a co-owner of the P.O. box. The P.O. box key was later found in the possession of Uzair Paracha
Uzair Paracha
Uzair Paracha is a Pakistani American convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda by a court in New York in 2005. He is serving a 30 year prison sentence.-Early life:...
, who was convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda, and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in 2006.
In February 2003, she married accused al-Qaeda member Ammar al-Baluchi, also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, in Karachi. Al Baluchi is a nephew of al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and a cousin of Ramzi Yousef
Ramzi Yousef
Ramzi Yousef was one of the main perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot. In 1995, he was arrested at a guest house in Islamabad, by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and United States Diplomatic Security Service, then extradited to the...
, convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Siddiqui's marriage to al-Baluchi was denied by her family, but confirmed by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence, a defense psychologist, and by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's family. She had worked with al-Baluchi in opening a P.O. box for Majid Khan, and says she married him in March or April 2003. Al-Baluchi was arrested on April 29, 2003, and taken to the Guantanamo Bay military prison; he faces the death penalty in his upcoming trial in the U.S., for aiding the 9/11 hijackers.
Disappearance
In early 2003, while Siddiqui was working at Aga Khan UniversityAga Khan University
The Aga Khan University is a coeducational research university spread over three continents. It was granted its charter in 1983 as Pakistan's first private, autonomous university. AKU was founded by His Highness the Aga Khan, and is part of the Aga Khan Development Network...
in Karachi, she emailed a former professor at Brandeis and expressed interest in working in the U.S., citing lack of options in Karachi for women of her academic background.
According to the media, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, alleged al-Qaeda chief planner of the September 11 attacks, was interrogated by the CIA after his arrest on March 1, 2003. Mohammed was tortured by waterboarding
Waterboarding
Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over the face of an immobilized captive, thus causing the individual to experience the sensation of drowning...
183 times, and his resultant confessions triggered a series of related arrests shortly thereafter. The press reported Mohammed naming Siddiqui as an al-Qaeda operative; On March 25, 2003, the FBI issued a global "wanted for questioning" alert for Siddiqui and her ex-husband, Amjad Khan. Siddiqui was accused of being a "courier of blood diamonds and a financial fixer for al-Qaida". Khan was questioned by the FBI, and released.
Afraid the FBI would find her in Karachi, a few days later she left her parents' house along with her three children on March 30. She took a taxi to the airport, ostensibly to catch a morning flight to Islamabad
Islamabad
Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan and the tenth largest city in the country. Located within the Islamabad Capital Territory , the population of the city has grown from 100,000 in 1951 to 1.7 million in 2011...
to visit her uncle, but disappeared.
Siddiqui's and her children's whereabouts and activities from March 2003 to July 2008 are a matter of dispute.
On April 1, 2003, local newspapers reported, and Pakistan interior ministry confirmed, that a woman had been taken into custody on terrorism charges. The Boston Globe described "sketchy" Pakistani news reports saying Pakistani authorities had detained Siddiqui, and had questioned her with FBI agents. However, a couple of days later, both the Pakistan government and the FBI publicly denied having anything to do with her disappearance. On April 21, 2003, a “senior U.S. law enforcement official” told Lisa Myers of NBC Nightly News that Siddiqui was in Pakistani custody. The same source retracted the statement the next day without explanation. On April 22, 2003, two U.S. federal law enforcement officials anonymously said Siddiqui had been taken into custody by Pakistani authorities. Pakistani officials never confirmed the arrest, however, and later that day the U.S. officials amended their earlier statements, saying new information made it "doubtful" she was in custody. Her sister Fauzia claimed Interior Minister Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat said that her sister had been released and would be returning home "shortly".
In 2003–04, the FBI and the Pakistani government said they did not know where Siddiqui was. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft
John Ashcroft
John David Ashcroft is a United States politician who served as the 79th United States Attorney General, from 2001 until 2005, appointed by President George W. Bush. Ashcroft previously served as the 50th Governor of Missouri and a U.S...
called her the most wanted woman in the world, an al-Qaeda "facilitator" who posed a "clear and present danger to the U.S." On May 26, 2004, the U.S. listed her among the seven "most wanted" al-Qaeda fugitives. One day before the announcement, The New York Times cited the Department of Homeland Security saying there were no current risks; American Democrats accused the Bush administration of attempting to divert attention from plummeting poll numbers and to push the failings of the Invasion of Iraq off the front pages.
According to her ex-husband, after the global alert for her was issued Siddiqui went into hiding, and worked for al-Qaeda. During her disappearance Khan said he saw her at Islamabad airport in April 2003, as she disembarked from a flight with their son, and said he helped Inter-Services Intelligence
Inter-Services Intelligence
The Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence , is Pakistan's premier intelligence agency, responsible for providing critical national security intelligence assessment to the Government of Pakistan...
identify her. He said he again saw her two years later, in a Karachi traffic jam.
Media reports Siddiqui having told the FBI that she worked at the Karachi Institute of Technology in 2005, was in Afghanistan in the winter of 2007; she stayed for a time during her disappearance in Quetta, Pakistan, and was sheltered by various people. According to an intelligence official in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, her son Ahmad, who was with her when she was arrested, said he and Siddiqui had worked in an office in Pakistan, collecting money for poor people. He told Afghan investigators that on August 14, 2008, they had traveled by road from Quetta, Pakistan, to Afghanistan. Amjad Khan, who unsuccessfully sought custody of his eldest son, Ahmad, said most of the claims of the family in the Pakistani media relating to her and their children were to garner public support and sympathy for her; he said they were one-sided and in mostly false. An Afghan intelligence official said he believes that Siddiqui was working with Jaish-e-Mohammed
Jaish-e-Mohammed
Jaish-e-Mohammed is a Pakistani-based, militant Islamic group established by Maulana Masood Azhar in March 2000...
(the "Army of Muhammad"), a Pakistani Islamic mujahedeen military group that fights in Kashmir
Kashmir
Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range...
and Afghanistan.
Siddiqui's maternal uncle, Shams ul-Hassan Faruqi, said that on January 22, 2008, she visited him in Islamabad. He said that she told him she had been held by Pakistani agencies, and asked for his help in order to cross into Afghanistan, where she thought she would be safe in the hands of the Taliban. He had worked in Afghanistan, and made contact with the Taliban in 1999, but told her he was no longer in touch with them. He notified his sister, Siddiqui's mother, who came the next day to see her daughter. He said that Siddiqui stayed with them for two days. Her uncle has signed an affidavit swearing to these facts.
Ahmad and Siddiqui reappeared in 2008. Afghan authorities handed the boy over to Pakistan in September 2008, and he now lives with his aunt in Karachi, who has prohibited him from talking to the press. In April 2010, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik
Rehman Malik
27 April 2009 He has been the interior adviser since 27 March 2008.Senator A. Rehman Malik is a Pakistani politician, member of the Senate of Pakistan, and the current Interior Minister of Pakistan under the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani administration. His Second name is Shetan Malik and he...
said that a 12-year-old girl who was found outside a house in Karachi was identified by a DNA test as Siddiqui's daughter Mariyam, and that she had been returned to her family.
Alternative scenarios
Siddiqui's sister and mother denied that she had any connections to al-Qaeda, and that the U.S. detained her secretly in Afghanistan after she disappeared in Pakistan in March 2003 with her three children. They point to comments by former Bagram Air BaseBagram Theater Internment Facility
The Parwan Detention Facility , also called the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, is a United States-run prison located next to Bagram Airfield in the Parwan Province of Afghanistan.It was formerly known as the Bagram Collection Point...
, Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
, detainees who say they believe a woman held at the prison while they were there was Siddiqui. Her sister said that Siddiqui had been raped, and tortured for five years. According to Islamic convert and former Taliban captive Yvonne Ridley
Yvonne Ridley
Yvonne Ridley is a British journalist, war correspondent and Respect Party activist best known for her capture by the Taliban and subsequent conversion to Islam after release, her outspoken opposition to Zionism, and her criticism of Western media portrayals of the War on Terror...
, Siddiqui spent those years in solitary confinement at Bagram as Prisoner 650. Six human rights groups, including Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
, listed her as possibly being a "ghost prisoner" held by the U.S. Siddiqui claimed that she had been kidnapped by U.S. intelligence and Pakistani intelligence.
Siddiqui has not explained clearly what happened to her two missing children. She alternated between saying that the two youngest children were dead, and that they were with her sister Fowzia, according to a psychiatric exam. She told one FBI agent that sometimes one has to take up a cause that is more important than one's children. Khan said he believed that the missing children were in Karachi, either with or in contact with Siddiqui's family, and not in U.S. detention. He said that they were seen in her sister's house in Karachi and in Islamabad
Islamabad
Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan and the tenth largest city in the country. Located within the Islamabad Capital Territory , the population of the city has grown from 100,000 in 1951 to 1.7 million in 2011...
on several occasions since their alleged disappearance in 2003.
In April 2010, Mariam was found outside the family house wearing a collar with the address of the family home. She was said to be speaking English. A Pakistani ministry official said the girl was believed to have been held captive in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2010.
The U.S. government said it did not hold Siddiqui during that time period, and had no knowledge of her whereabouts from March 2003 until July 2008. The U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, Anne Patterson, categorically stated that Siddiqui had not been in U.S. custody "at any time" prior to July 2008. A U.S. Justice Department spokesman called the allegations "absolutely baseless and false", a CIA spokesman also denied that she had been detained by the U.S., and Gregory Sullivan, a State Department spokesman, said: "For several years, we have had no information regarding her whereabouts whatsoever. It is our belief that she ... has all this time been concealed from the public view by her own choosing." Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin said in 2008 that U.S. agencies had searched for evidence to support allegations that Siddiqui was detained in 2003, and held for years, but found "zero evidence" that she was abducted, kidnapped, raped or tortured. He added: "A more plausible inference is that she went into hiding because people around her started to get arrested, and at least two of those people ended up at Guantanamo Bay. According to some U.S. officials, she went underground after the FBI alert for her was issued, and was at large working on behalf of al-Qaeda. The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
cited an anonymous senior Pakistani official suggesting an "invaluable asset" like Siddiqui may have been "flipped" — turned against militant sympathisers — by Pakistani or American intelligence.
Ahmed Siddiqui's account
In August 2010 Yvonne Ridley reported that she had acquired a three-paragraph statement taken from Ahmed by a U.S. officer before he was released from U.S. custody.The statement is extracted from a document provided to British journalist, Yvonne Ridley.Ahmed described Aafia driving a vehicle taking the family from Karachi to Islamabad, when it was overtaken by several vehicles, and he and his mother were taken into custody. He described the bloody body of his baby brother being left on the side of the road.
He said that he had been too afraid to ask his interrogators who they were, but that they included both Pakistanis and Americans. He described beatings when he was in U.S. custody.
Eventually, he said, he was sent to a conventional children's prison in Pakistan.
His statement does not describe how he and his mother came to be in Ghazni in 2008.
Arrest in Afghanistan
Siddiqui was approached by Ghazni ProvinceGhazni Province
Ghazni is one of the thirty-four provinces of Afghanistan. Babur records in his Babur-Nama that Ghazni is also known as Zabulistan It is in the east of the country. Its capital is Ghazni City...
police officers outside the Ghazni governor's compound on the evening of July 17, 2008 in the city of Ghazni
Ghazni
For the Province of Ghazni see Ghazni ProvinceGhazni is a city in central-east Afghanistan with a population of about 141,000 people...
. With two small bags at her side, crouching on the ground, she aroused the suspicion of a man who feared she might be concealing a bomb under the burqua that she was wearing. A shopkeeper noticed a woman in a burqa
Burqa
A burqa is an enveloping outer garment worn by women in some Islamic religion to cover their bodies in public places. The burqa is usually understood to be the woman's loose body-covering , plus the head-covering , plus the face-veil .-Etymology:A speculative and unattested etymology...
drawing a map, which is suspicious in Afghanistan where women are generally illiterate. She was accompanied by a teenage boy about 12, whom she reportedly claimed was an orphan she had adopted. She said her name was Saliha, that she was from Multan
Multan
Multan , is a city in the Punjab Province of Pakistan and capital of Multan District. It is located in the southern part of the province on the east bank of the Chenab River, more or less in the geographic centre of the country and about from Islamabad, from Lahore and from Karachi...
in Pakistan, and that the boy's name was Ali Hassan. Discovering that she did not speak either of Afghanistan's main dialects, Pashtu or Dari
Dari (Eastern Persian)
Dari or Fārsī-ye Darī in historical terms refers to the Persian court language of the Sassanids. In contemporary usage, the term refers to the dialects of modern Persian language spoken in Afghanistan, and hence known as Afghan Persian in some Western sources. It is the term officially recognized...
, the officers regarded her as suspicious.
Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
and English describing the creation of explosives, chemical weapons, Ebola
Ebola
Ebola virus disease is the name for the human disease which may be caused by any of the four known ebolaviruses. These four viruses are: Bundibugyo virus , Ebola virus , Sudan virus , and Taï Forest virus...
, dirty bomb
Dirty bomb
A dirty bomb is a speculative radiological weapon that combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. The purpose of the weapon is to contaminate the area around the explosion with radioactive material, hence the attribute "dirty"....
s, and radiological agents (which discussed mortality rates of certain of the weapons), and handwritten notes referring to a "mass casualty attack" that listed various U.S. locations and landmarks (including the Plum Island Animal Disease Center
Plum Island Animal Disease Center
Plum Island Animal Disease Center is a United States federal research facility dedicated to the study of animal diseases. It is part of the DHS Directorate for Science and Technology....
, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the New York City subway system), according to her indictment. The Globe also mentioned one document about a 'theoretical' biological weapon that did not harm children. She also reportedly had documents detailing U.S. "military assets", excerpts from The Anarchist's Arsenal, a one-gigabyte digital media storage device that contained over 500 electronic documents (including correspondence referring to attacks by "cells", describing the U.S. as an enemy, and discussing recruitment of jihadists and training), maps of Ghazni and the provincial governor's compounds and the mosques he prayed in, and photos of Pakistani military people. Other notes described various ways to attack enemies, including by destroying reconnaissance drones
Unmanned aerial vehicle
An unmanned aerial vehicle , also known as a unmanned aircraft system , remotely piloted aircraft or unmanned aircraft, is a machine which functions either by the remote control of a navigator or pilot or autonomously, that is, as a self-directing entity...
, using underwater bombs, and using gliders
Glider aircraft
Glider aircraft are heavier-than-air craft that are supported in flight by the dynamic reaction of the air against their lifting surfaces, and whose free flight does not depend on an engine. Mostly these types of aircraft are intended for routine operation without engines, though engine failure can...
.
She also had "numerous chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars", according to the later complaint against her, and about two pounds of sodium cyanide
Sodium cyanide
Sodium cyanide is an inorganic compound with the formula NaCN. This highly toxic colorless salt is used mainly in gold mining but has other niche applications...
, a highly toxic poison. The U.S. prosecutors later said that sodium cyanide is lethal even when ingested in small doses (even less than five milligrams), and various of the other chemicals she had can be used in explosives. Abdul Ghani, Ghazni's deputy police chief, said she later confessed that she intended to carry out a suicide attack against the provincial governor.
The officers arrested her, as she cursed them, and took her to a police station. She said that the boy found with her was her stepson, Ali Hasan; Siddiqui subsequently admitted he was her biological son, when DNA testing proved the boy to be Ahmed.
There are conflicting accounts of the events following her arrest which led to her being sent to the United States for trial. American authorities say that two FBI agents, a U.S. Army warrant officer, a U.S. Army captain, and their U.S. military interpreters arrived in Ghazni the following day, on July 18, to interview Siddiqui at the Afghan National Police facility where she was being held.
Shooting
- American authorities say that the following day, on July 18, two FBI agents, a U.S. Army warrant officer, a U.S. Army captain, and their U.S. military interpreters arrived in Ghazni to interview Siddiqui at the Afghan National Police facility where she was being held. They reported they congregated in a meeting room that was partitioned by a curtain, but did not realize that Siddiqui was standing unsecured behind the curtain. The warrant officer sat down adjacent to the curtain, and put his loaded M4 carbineM4 carbineThe M4 carbine is a family of firearms tracing its lineage back to earlier carbine versions of the M16, all based on the original AR-15 designed by Eugene Stoner and made by ArmaLite. It is a shorter and lighter variant of the M16A2 assault rifle, with 80% parts commonality.It is a gas-operated,...
assault rifleAssault rifleAn assault rifle is a selective fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine. Assault rifles are the standard infantry weapons in most modern armies...
on the floor by his feet, next to the curtain. Siddiqui drew back the curtain, picked up the rifle, and pointed it at the captain. “I could see the barrel of the rifle, the inner portion of the barrel of the weapon; that indicated to me that it was pointed straight at my head,” he said.
Then, she was said to have threatened them loudly in English, and yelled "Get the fuck out of here" and "May the blood of [unintelligible] be on your [head or hands]". The captain dove for cover to his left, as she yelled "Allah Akbar" and fired at least two shots at them, missing them.
An Afghan interpreter who was seated closest to her lunged, grabbed and pushed the rifle, and tried to wrest it from her. At that point the warrant officer returned fire with a 9-millimeter pistol, hitting her in the torso, and one of the interpreters managed to wrestle the rifle away from her. During the ensuing struggle she initially struck and kicked the officers, while shouting in English that she wanted to kill Americans, and then lost consciousness.
- Siddiqui related a different version of events, according to Pakistani senators who later visited her in jail. She denied touching a gun, shouting, or threatening anyone. She said she stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain, and that after one of the startled soldiers shouted "She is loose", she was shot. On regaining consciousness, she said someone said "We could lose our jobs."
- Some of the Afghan police offered a third version of the events, telling ReutersReutersReuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
that U.S. troops had demanded that she be handed over, disarmed the Afghans when they refused, and then shot Siddiqui mistakenly thinking she was a suicide bomber.
Siddiqui was taken to Bagram Air Base by helicopter in critical condition. When she arrived at the hospital she was rated at 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale
Glasgow Coma Scale
Glasgow Coma Scale or GCS is a neurological scale that aims to give a reliable, objective way of recording the conscious state of a person for initial as well as subsequent assessment...
, but she underwent emergency surgery without complication. She was hospitalized at the Craig Theater Joint Hospital, and recovered over the next two weeks. Once she was in a stable condition, the Afghan government allowed the Americans to transport her to the United States for trial. The day after landing, Siddiqui was arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom on charges of attempted murder. Her three-person defense team was hired by the Pakistani embassy to supplement her two existing public defenders, but Siddiqui refused to cooperate with them.
Charges
Siddiqui was charged on July 31, 2008, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New YorkUnited States District Court for the Southern District of New York
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York is a federal district court. Appeals from the Southern District of New York are taken to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (in case...
, with assault with a deadly weapon, and with attempting to kill U.S. personnel. She was flown to New York on August 6, and indicted on September 3, 2008, on two counts of attempted murder of U.S. nationals, officers, and employees, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying and using a firearm, and three counts of assault on U.S. officers and employees.
Explaining why the U.S. may have chosen to charge her as they did, rather than for her alleged terrorism, Bruce Hoffman
Bruce Hoffman
Bruce Hoffman is the Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service and a specialist in the study of terrorism and counter-insurgency...
, professor of security studies at Georgetown University, said the decision turned what might have been a potentially complex terrorism matter into a more straightforward case:
"There’s no intelligence data that needs to be introduced, no sources and methods that need to be risked. It’s a good old-fashioned crime; it’s the equivalent of a 1920s gangster with a tommy gun."
Medical treatment and psychological assessments
According to FBI reports prepared shortly after July 18, 2008, Siddiqui repeatedly denied shooting anyone, and later told a U.S. special agent at the Craig Hospital on or about August 1 that "'spewing bullets at soldiers is bad', but to her surprise 'you' have still taken care of me and treated me well." On August 11, after her counsel maintained that Siddiqui had not seen a doctor since arriving in the U.S. the previous week, U.S. magistrate judge Henry B. Pitman ordered that she be examined by a medical doctor within 24 hours. Prosecutors maintained that Siddiqui had been provided with adequate medical care since her detention in Afghanistan, though at the hearing they were unable to confirm whether she had been seen in New York by a doctor or by a paramedic. The judge postponed her bail hearing until September 3. An examination by a doctor the following day found no visible signs of infection; she also received a CAT scan.Siddiqui was provided care for her wound while incarcerated in the U.S. In September 2008, a prosecutor reported to the court that Siddiqui had refused to be examined by a female doctor, despite the doctor's extensive efforts. On September 9, 2008, she underwent a forced medical exam. In November 2008, forensic psychologist Dr. Leslie Powers reported that Siddiqui had been "reluctant to allow medical staff to treat her". Her last medical exam had indicated her external wounds no longer required medical dressing, and were healing well. A psychiatrist employed by the prosecutor to examine Siddiqui's competence to stand trial, Gregory B. Saathoff M.D., noted in a March 2009 report that Siddiqui frequently verbally and physically refused to allow the medical staff to check her vital signs and weight, attempted to refuse medical care once it was apparent that her wound had largely healed, and refused to take antibiotics. At the same time, Siddiqui claimed to her brother that when she needed medical treatment she did not get it, which Saathoff said he found no support for in his review of documents and interviews with medical and security personnel, nor in his interviews with Siddiqui.
Siddiqui's trial was subject to delays, the longest being six months in order to perform psychiatric evaluations. She had been given routine mental health check-ups ten times in August and six times in September.
She underwent three sets of psychological assessments before trial. Her first psychiatric evaluation diagnosed her with depressive psychosis, and her second evaluation, ordered by the court, revealed chronic depression. Leslie Powers initially determined Siddiqui mentally unfit to stand trial. After reviewing portions of FBI reports, however, she told the pre-trial judge she believed Siddiqui was faking mental illness.
In a third set of psychological assessments, more detailed than the previous two, three of four psychiatrists concluded that she was"malingering" (faking her symptoms of mental illness). One suggested that this was to prevent criminal prosecution, and to improve her chances of being returned to Pakistan. In April 2009, Manhattan federal judge Richard Berman
Richard M. Berman
Richard M. Berman is a senior Federal District Judge in the Southern District of New York. He received his BS from Cornell University in 1964 and his JD from NYU School of Law in 1967. He also received an MSW from Fordham University in 1996...
held that she "may have some mental health issues" but was competent to stand trial.
Objection to jurors with Zionist or Israeli background
Siddiqui said she did not want jurors with Zionist or Israeli background on the jury. She demanded that all prospective jurors be DNADNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
-tested, and excluded from the jury at her trial:
if they have a Zionist or IsraelSiddiqui's legal team said, in regard to her comments, that her incarceration had damaged her mind.IsraelThe State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
i background ... they are all mad at me ... I have a feeling everyone here is them—subject to genetic testing. They should be excluded, if you want to be fair.
Prior to her trial, Siddiqui said she was innocent of all charges. She maintained she could prove she was innocent, but refused to do so in court. On January 11, 2010, Siddiqui told the Judge that she would not cooperate with her attorneys, and wanted to fire them. She also said she did not trust the Judge, and added, “I’m boycotting the trial, just to let all of you know. There’s too many injustices." She then put her head down on the defense table as the prosecution proceeded.
Trial proceedings
After 18 months of detention, Siddiqui's trial began in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
on January 19, 2010. Prior to the jury entering the courtroom, Siddiqui told onlookers that she would not work with her lawyers because the trial was a sham. She also said: "I have information about attacks, more than 9/11! ... I want to help the President to end this group, to finish them... They are a domestic, U.S. group; they are not Muslim."
Nine government witnesses were called by the prosecution: Army Captain Robert Snyder, John Threadcraft, a former army officer, and FBI agent John Jefferson testified first. As Snyder testified that Siddiqui had been arrested with a handwritten note outlining plans to attack various U.S. sites, she interjected: "Since I'll never get a chance to speak... If you were in a secret prison... or your children were tortured... Give me a little credit, this is not a list of targets against New York. I was never planning to bomb it. You're lying." The court also heard from FBI agent John Jefferson and Ahmed Gul, an army interpreter, who recounted their struggle with her.
The judge allowed the jury to hear about her target list and other handwritten notes, but not about the chemicals and mass-produced documents from "how-to" terror manuals, or about Siddiqui's alleged ties to al-Qaeda because they could have created an inappropriate bias.
The defense said there was no forensic evidence that the rifle was fired in the interrogation room. They noted the nine government witnesses offered conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were positioned and how many shots were fired. It said it her handbag contents were not credible as evidence because they were sloppily handled. According to the Associated Press of Pakistan, Carlo Rosati, an FBI firearms expert witness in the federal court doubted whether the M-4 rifle was ever fired at the crime scene.; an FBI agent testified that Siddiqui's fingerprint
Fingerprint
A fingerprint in its narrow sense is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. In a wider use of the term, fingerprints are the traces of an impression from the friction ridges of any part of a human hand. A print from the foot can also leave an impression of friction ridges...
s were not found on the rifle. The prosecution argued that it was not unusual to fail to get fingerprints off a gun. "This is a crime that was committed in a war zone, a chaotic and uncontrolled environment 6,000 miles away from here." Gul's testimony appeared, according to the defense, to differ from that given by Snyder with regard to whether Siddiqui was standing or on her knees as she fired the rifle. When Siddiqui testified, though she admitted trying to escape, she denied that she had grabbed the rifle and said she had been tortured in secret prisons before her arrest by a “group of people pretending to be Americans, doing bad things in America’s name.”
During the trial, Siddiqui was removed from the court several times for repeatedly interrupting the proceedings with shouting; on being ejected, she was told by the judge that she could watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television in an adjacent holding cell. A request by the defense lawyers to declare a mistrial was turned down by the judge.
Conviction
She faced a minimum sentence of 30 years and a maximum of life in prison on the firearm charge, and could also have received a sentence of up to 20 years for each attempted murder and armed assault charge, and up to 8 years on each of the remaining assault counts. Her lawyers requested a 12-year sentence, instead of the life sentence recommended by the probation office. They argued that mental illness drove her actions when she attempted to escape from the Afghan National Police station "by any means available ... what she viewed as a horrific fate". Her lawyers also claimed her mental illness was on display during her trial outbursts and boycotts, and that she was "first and foremost" the victim of her own irrational behavior. The sentencing hearing set to take place on May 6, 2010, was rescheduled for mid-August 2010, and then September 2010.
Sentencing
Siddiqui was sentenced to 86 years in prison by the federal judge Berman in Manhattan on September 23, 2010, following a one-hour hearing in which she testified.A New York Times reporter wrote that at times during the hearing Judge Berman seemed to be speaking to an audience beyond the courtroom in an apparent attempt to address widespread speculation about Ms. Siddiqui and her case.
He gave as an example a reference to the five-year period before her 2008 arrest of Ms. Siddiqui’s disappearance and claims of torture, where the Judge said: "I am aware of no evidence in the record to substantiate these allegations or to establish them as fact. There is no credible evidence in the record that the United States officials and/or agencies detained Dr. Siddiqui".
At the time of sentencing Siddiqui didn't show any interest in filing an appeal, instead saying "I appeal to God, and He hears me." After she was sentenced, Siddiqui urged forgiveness and asked the public not to take any action in retaliation.
Imprisonment
Siddiqui (Federal Bureau of PrisonsFederal Bureau of Prisons
The Federal Bureau of Prisons is a federal law enforcement agency subdivision of the United States Department of Justice and is responsible for the administration of the federal prison system. The system also handles prisoners who committed acts considered felonies under the District of Columbia's...
#90279-054) was originally held at Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn
Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn
The Metropolitan Detention Center located at 80 29th Street near Gowanus Bay, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues on 29th Street, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York, is one of several MDCs operated by the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons....
. She is now being held in Federal Medical Center, Carswell
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
The Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, is a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility that provides specialized medical and mental health services to female offenders. FMC Carswell is located in the northeast corner of Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth . Its address is...
in Fort Worth, Texas
Fort Worth, Texas
Fort Worth is the 16th-largest city in the United States of America and the fifth-largest city in the state of Texas. Located in North Central Texas, just southeast of the Texas Panhandle, the city is a cultural gateway into the American West and covers nearly in Tarrant, Parker, Denton, and...
.
Reaction
Anti-warAnti-war
An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many...
activist Cindy Sheehan
Cindy Sheehan
Cindy Lee Miller Sheehan is an American anti-war activist whose son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed by enemy action during the Iraq War. She attracted national and international media attention in August 2005 for her extended anti-war protest at a makeshift camp outside President...
, criticised the conviction and the judicial process saying it was carried out by a kangaroo court
Kangaroo court
A kangaroo court is "a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted".The outcome of a trial by kangaroo court is essentially determined in advance, usually for the purpose of ensuring conviction, either by going through the motions of manipulated procedure or...
, with the judge displaying an "open bias" and the trial was unjust.
Taliban reaction
According to a February 2010 report in the Pakistani newspaper The News International, the Taliban threatened to execute captured U.S. soldier Bowe BergdahlBowe Bergdahl
Bowe Robert Bergdahl is a United States Army soldier who, since June 2009, is in the captivity of the Taliban-supporting Afghanistan Haqqani network.-Military status and disappearance:...
, whom they have held since June 2009, in retaliation for Siddiqui's conviction. A Taliban spokesperson claimed that members of Siddiqui's family had requested help from the Taliban to obtain her release from prison in the U.S.
In September 2010 the Taliban kidnapped Linda Norgrove, a Scottish aid worker in Afghanistan, and Taliban commanders insisted Norgrove would be handed over only in exchange for Siddiqui.
On October 8, 2010, Norgrove was accidentally killed during a rescue attempt by a grenade thrown by one of her rescuers.
A speaker for the Taliban, Waliur Rehman, announced that they wanted to swap Siddiqui for two Swiss citizens abducted in Balochistan
Kidnapping of Swiss tourists in Balochistan
On the 2nd of July 2011, a Swiss couple was kidnapped in the Balochistan province of southwestern Pakistan. The couple were said to be tourists who were travelling by car to neighboring Iran when they were seized by unidentified gunmen in the Loralai District, which is some 150 km north of the...
.
Reaction in Pakistan
In August 2009, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani met with Siddiqui's sister at his residence, and assured her that Pakistan would seek Siddiqui's release from the U.S. The Pakistani government paid $2 million for the services of three lawyers to defend Siddiqui during her trial. Many Siddiqui supporters were present during the proceedings, and outside the court dozens of people rallied to demand her release.A petition was filed seeking action against the Pakistani government for it having not approached the International Court of Justice
International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice is the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. It is based in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands...
(ICJ) to have Siddiqui released from the United States. Barrister Javed Iqbal Jaffree said the CIA arrested Siddiqui in Karachi in 2003, and one of her sons was killed during her arrest. On January 21, 2010, Jaffree submitted documents allegedly proving the arrest to the Lahore High Court
Lahore High Court
The Lahore High Court is based in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. It was established as a high court on March 21, 1919. The Lahore High Court has jurisdiction over Punjab...
.
In Pakistan, Siddiqui's February 2010 conviction was followed with expressions of support by many Pakistanis, who appeared increasingly anti-American
Anti-Americanism
The term Anti-Americanism, or Anti-American Sentiment, refers to broad opposition or hostility to the people, policies, culture or government of the United States...
, as well as by politicians and the news media, who characterized her as a symbol of victimization by the United States. Her ex-husband, Amjad Khan, was one of the few who expressed a different view, saying that Siddiqui was "reaping the fruit of her own decision. Her family has been portraying Aafia as a victim. We would like the truth to come out."
After Siddiqui's conviction, she sent a message through her lawyer, saying that she does not want "violent protests or violent reprisals in Pakistan over this verdict." Thousands of students, political and social activists protested in Pakistan. Some shouted anti-American slogans, while burning the American flag and effigies of President Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
in the streets (see also: anti-Americanism in Pakistan
Anti-Americanism in Pakistan
Anti-Americanism in Pakistan is one of the strongest in the world. Anti-Americanism has risen as a result of U.S. military drone attacks in Pakistan introduced by President George W. Bush and continued by President Barack Obama...
). Her sister has spoken frequently and passionately on her behalf at rallies. Echoing her family's comments, and anti-U.S. sentiment, many believe she was picked up in Karachi in 2003, detained at the U.S. Bagram Airbase, raped and tortured, and that the charges against her were fabricated.
The Pakistani Embassy in Washington, DC, expressed its dismay over the verdict, which followed "intense diplomatic and legal efforts on her behalf. [We] will consult the family of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and the team of defense lawyers to determine the future course of action." Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani described Siddiqui as a “daughter of the nation,” and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif
Nawaz Sharif
Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif is a Pakistani conservative politician and steel magnate who served as 12th Prime Minister of Pakistan in two non-consecutive terms from November 1990 to July 1993, and from February 1997 to October 12, 1999...
promised to push for her release. On February 18, President Asif Ali Zardari
Asif Ali Zardari
Asif Ali Zardari is the 11th and current President of Pakistan and the Co-Chairman of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party . He is also the widower of Benazir Bhutto, who served two nonconsecutive terms as Prime Minister....
requested of Richard Holbrooke
Richard Holbrooke
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was an American diplomat, magazine editor, author, professor, Peace Corps official, and investment banker....
, U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. consider repatriating Siddiqui to Pakistan under the Pakistan-U.S. Prisoner Exchange Agreement. On February 22, the Pakistani Senate passed a resolution expressing its grave concern over Siddiqui's sentence, and demanding that the government take effective steps including diplomatic measures to secure her immediate release.
Shireen Mazari, editor of the Pakistani newspaper The Nation, wrote that the verdict "did not really surprise anyone familiar with the vindictive mindset of the U.S. public post-9/11". Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy is a bimonthly American magazine founded in 1970 by Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel.Originally, the magazine was a quarterly...
reported that rumors about her alleged sexual abuse
Sexual abuse
Sexual abuse, also referred to as molestation, is the forcing of undesired sexual behavior by one person upon another. When that force is immediate, of short duration, or infrequent, it is called sexual assault. The offender is referred to as a sexual abuser or molester...
by captors, fuelled by constant stories in the Pakistani press, had made her a folk hero, and "become part of the legend that surrounds her, so much so that they are repeated as established facts by her supporters, who have helped build her iconic status".
Steve Inskeep
Steve Inskeep
Steve Inskeep born , is one of the current hosts of Morning Edition on National Public Radio. He, along with co-host Renée Montagne, were assigned as interim hosts to succeed Bob Edwards after NPR reassigned Edwards to Senior Correspondent after April 30, 2004. Inskeep and Montagne were...
of National Public Radio noted on March 1 that while when Siddiqui's case has been covered in the U.S., it has mostly been described as a straightforward case of terrorism, in contrast when "the Pakistani media described this very same woman, this very same case, the assumptions are all very different". The News International
The News International
The News International , published in tabloid size, is the largest English language newspaper in Pakistan. The News has an ABC certified circulation of 140,000. It is published from Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi/Islamabad...
, Pakistan's largest circulation English tabloid, carried a March 3 letter from Talat Farooq
Talat Farooq
Talat Farooq is an educator, human rights activist, poet, columnist, and the executive editor of the research journal Criterion Quarterly in Islamabad, Pakistan. Criterion describes itself as a quarterly magazine that aims "at producing well researched articles for discerning readership," and...
, the executive editor of the magazine Criterion in Islamabad, in which she wrote:
The media has highlighted her ordeal without debating the downside of her story in objective detail. A whole generation of Pakistanis, grown up in an environment that discourages critical analysis and dispassionate objectivity ... has ... allowed their emotions to be exploited. The Aafia case is complex... The grey lady is grey precisely because of her murky past and the question mark hanging over her alleged links to militants.... Her family's silence during the years of her disappearance, and her ex-husband's side of the story, certainly provide fodder to the opposing point of view.... The right-wing parties ... have once again played the card of anti-Americanism to attain their own political ends.... Our hatred of America, based on some very real grievances, also serves as a readily available smokescreen to avoid any rational thinking.
A New York Times article reviewing the Pakistani reaction noted: "All of this has taken place with little national soul-searching about the contradictory and frequently damning circumstances surrounding Ms. Siddiqui, who is suspected of having had links to Al Qaeda and the banned jihadi group Jaish-e-Muhammad. Instead, the Pakistani news media have broadly portrayed her trial as a “farce”, and an example of the injustices meted out to Muslims by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001."
Jessica Eve Stern, a terrorism specialist and lecturer at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
, observed: "Whatever the truth is, this case is of great political importance because of how people [in Pakistan] view her."
In September 2010, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik
Rehman Malik
27 April 2009 He has been the interior adviser since 27 March 2008.Senator A. Rehman Malik is a Pakistani politician, member of the Senate of Pakistan, and the current Interior Minister of Pakistan under the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani administration. His Second name is Shetan Malik and he...
sent a letter to the United States Attorney General calling for repatriation of Siddiqui to Pakistan. He said that the case of Siddiqui had become a matter of public concern in Pakistan and her repatriation would create goodwill for the U.S.
On September 27, 2010 the MQM
Muttahida Qaumi Movement
Muttahida Qaumi Movement generally known as MQM, is a liberal-secular political party of Pakistan. It is generally known as a party which holds immense mobilizing potential in province of Sindh...
announced that it would take out a procession the next day "to condemn the sentence awarded to Dr Aafia Siddiqui in the United States."
Failed "Swap" with Raymond Allen Davis
The parents of the two young men who were shot dead by Raymond DavisRaymond Allen Davis incident
Raymond Allen Davis is a former United States Army soldier, private security firm employee, and contractor with the Central Intelligence Agency . On January 27, 2011, Davis killed two reportedly armed men in Lahore, Pakistan. Although the U.S. government contended that he was protected by...
, CIA contractor in Pakistan and US consulate employee, on Jan 27th 2011 had said they are ready to withdraw the murder case filed against him if the US authorities allow Siddiqui to return to Pakistan as a free citizen. However, both the families backed out afterwards and agreed to drop the case (according to Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...
, under some pressure from the Pakistani government) in return for accepting payment of up to 3 million USD as diyya
Diyya
Diyya is compensation paid to the heirs of a victim. In Arabic, the word means both blood money and ransom.-Islamic and Arab tradition:The Qur'an specifies the principle of Qisas Diyya (plural: Diyyat; ) is compensation paid to the heirs of a victim. In Arabic, the word means both blood money and...
or blood money
Blood money (term)
Blood money is money or some sort of compensation paid by an offender or his family group to the family or kin group of the victim.-Particular examples and uses:...
as specified by Islamic Sharia
Sharia
Sharia law, is the moral code and religious law of Islam. Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law: the precepts set forth in the Quran, and the example set by the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah. Fiqh jurisprudence interprets and extends the application of sharia to...
tradition; Davis was later released by Pakistan and went back to the US.
Primary sources
Court documents- Sealed Complaint, U.S. v. Siddiqui, July 31, 2008.
Court documents posted by the NEFA Foundation
- FBI Seeking Information poster, undated.
- Indictment, U.S. v. Siddiqui, September 3, 2008.
- "Forensic Evaluation; Aafia Siddiqui", Leslie Powers, November 6, 2008
- "Forensic Update; Aafia Siddiqui", Leslie Powers, May 4, 2009
- "Forensic Psychiatric Evaluation; CST Aafia Siddiqui", Gregory B. Saathoff, March 15, 2009
- "Forensic Psychological Evaluation; Aafia Siddiqui", L. Thomas Kucharski, July 2, 2009
- Order Finding Defendant Competent to Stand Trial, U.S. v. Siddiqui, July 29, 2009
- Government's Sentencing Submission, U.S. v. Siddiqui, July 29, 2010
- Sentencing Memorandum of Defendant Aafia Siddiqui, U.S. v. Siddiqui, July 29, 2010
Other sources
- Official website of Siddiqui's family
- Draafia.org website
- "Aafia Siddiqui Indicted", Press Release by U.S. Department of Justice, September 2, 2008
- "Aafia Siddiqui Found Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court of Attempting to Murder U.S. Nationals in Afghanistan and Six Additional Charges" Press Release by U.S. Department of Justice. February 3, 2010, reprinted by the NEFA foundation.