Aafia Siddiqui (born March 2, 1972, in Karachi, Pakistan) is an American-educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist who has been convicted after a jury trial in a U.S. federal court, of assault with intent to murder her U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan. She is incarcerated in New York and is awaiting sentencing, which is scheduled for September 23, 2010. The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
A devout Muslim who had engaged in Islamic charity work and proselytizing in the U.S., Siddiqui moved back to Pakistan in 2002. She disappeared with her three young children in March 2003, shortly after the arrest of her second husband’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (Mohammed is the alleged chief planner of the September 11 attacks.) Siddiqui was added to the FBI Seeking Information – War on Terrorism list in 2003, which stated that although the Bureau had no specific information connecting Siddiqui to terrorism, it wanted to locate and question her. In May 2004, however, the FBI named Siddiqui as one of seven FBI Most Wanted Terrorists. Her whereabouts remained unknown for more than five years. In July 2008, she was arrested in Afghanistan outside the compound of the governor of Ghazni Province, on suspicion of being a suicide bomber. The Afghan police said she was carrying in her handbag handwritten notes on how to make C-4 explosives, gunpowder, deadly viruses, and machines to shoot down U.S. drones.She was also said to be carrying two pounds of deadly poison, a computer thumb drive, and descriptions of New York City landmarks, including the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.
Siddiqui was shot and severely wounded at the police compound the day after her arrest after she allegedly grabbed the unattended rifle of one of her American interrogators and began shooting at them. She received medical attention for her wounds at Bagram Air Base and was flown to the U.S. 17 days later. She was charged in a New York City federal court with two counts of attempted murder, armed assault, using and carrying a firearm, and three counts of assault on U.S. officers and employees. She denied the charges and said the interrogators fired on her when she attempted to flee. After receiving psychological exams and therapy, the federal judge declared her mentally fit to stand trial, although there was a dissenting medical opinion. Amnesty International monitored the trial “to assess the fairness of the proceedings, given many unresolved questions surrounding the case.” She was tried and convicted by a jury on all counts in February 2010 in Manhattan federal district court, and faces a minimum sentence of 30 years and maximum of life in prison. The prosecution has argued for “terrorism enhancement” of the charges and that would require a life term under the sentencing guidelines. The probation office has recommended a life sentence, but Siddiqui’s lawyers have requested a 12-year sentence, arguing that she has been mentally ill, and that she has been the principal victim of her own irrational behavior. The charges against her stemmed solely from the shooting, and Siddiqui has not to date been charged with, or prosecuted for, any terrorism-related offenses.
Many of Siddiqui’s supporters, including international human rights organizations, have claimed that Siddiqui was not an extremist and that she and her young children were illegally detained and interrogated by Pakistani intelligence during her five year disappearance, likely at the behest of the U.S. Siddiqui’s family has said she was abducted and tortured by U.S. intelligence. The U.S. and Pakistan governments have denied all such claims.
Biography
Early life
Siddiqui is the youngest of three siblings. She attended school in Zambia until the age of eight, and then subsequently in Karachi, Pakistan. Her father, Muhammad Salay Siddiqui, was a British-trained neurosurgeon, and her mother, Ismet (née Faroochi), is a now-retired Islamic teacher and social worker, who was prominent in political-religious circles. Her brother, Mohammad Azi Siddiqui, is an architect who lives in Texas; her sister, Fowzia, is a Harvard-trained neurologist who lives and works in Pakistan.
Undergraduate education
Siddiqui moved to Texas in the United States on a student visa in 1990, joining her brother. She attended the University of Houston for three semesters, then tansferred 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 majored in Biochemical and Biophysical Studies at MIT, she graduated in 1995 with a BS in Biology.
She was regarded as religious by her fellow MIT students, but not unusually so: Marnie Biando, a former 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 said in 2005 that "if Aafia was drawn into the world of terrorism, it may have been through the contacts and friendships she made in the early 1990s working for MIT’s Muslim Student Association." (MSA).
Siddiqui solicited money for the Al Kifah Refugee Center, an organization which had been founded by Abdullah Azzam, a mentor of Osama bin Laden. In addition to aiding Bosnian refugees, the organization raised funds for the 1980s fighting in Afghanistan, had a member who killed Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990, was tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and later formed the nucleus for al-Qaeda. Through the MSA she met several committed Islamists, including Suheil Laher, its imam, who publicly advocated Islamization and jihad before 9/11.
When Pakistan asked the U.S. and other Western nations for help in 1995 in combating religious extremism, Siddiqui sent around a scornful email deriding Pakistan's government and quoting a passage from the Quran that Muslims should not take Jews and Christians as friends. Siddiqui wrote three guides for teaching Islam, expressing the hope in one: "more and more people come to the [religion] of Allah until America becomes a Muslim land.”
In the 1990s, she took a 12-hour pistol training course, according to an employee of a rifle club who testified at her 2010 trial.
Graduate school, work and marriage
In 1995 her relatives arranged for her to marry a man she had never seen, Amjad Mohammed Khan, a Karachi, Pakistan resident who was a recent medical school grad. The marriage ceremony was conducted over the telephone. Khan then came to the U.S., and the couple lived first in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Roxbury (in Boston), where he worked as an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She gave birth to a son, Mohammad Ahmed in 1996, and to a daughter, Mariam Bint e Muhammad, in 1998; both are American citizens.
Siddiqui studied cognitive neuroscience at Brandeis University, receiving a Ph.D. in 2001 for her dissertation on learning through imitation, “Separating the Components of Imitation”. She also co-authored a journal article on selective learning, and taught General Biology Lab, a course required for undergraduate biology majors, pre-med and pre-dental students, in early 1999.
In 1999, while living in Boston, Siddiqui (as president), her husband (as treasurer), and her sister (as resident agent) founded the Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching as a nonprofit organization. On October 3, 2005, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the organization’s charitable status. 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
Disappearance
In early 2003, while Siddiqui was working at Aga Khan University 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.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Siddiqui’s second husband’s uncle, who reportedly revealed her name during his interrogation.
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 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. Khan was questioned by the FBI, and released.
Afraid the FBI would find her in Karachi, 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 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.
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 Base, 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 herself gave conflicting explanations. She alternately claimed that she had been kidnapped by U.S. intelligence and Pakistani intelligence, while also claiming that she was working for Pakistani intelligence during this time.
Siddiqui has not explained clearly what happened to her two other missing children. She has alternated between saying that the two youngest children are dead, and that they are 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 US ambassador to Islamabad, Anne Patterson, categorically stated that Siddiqui had not been in US 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, 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 cites an anonymous senior Pakistani official suggesting an “invaluable asset” like Siddiqui may have been “flipped” — turned against militant sympathisers — by Pakistani or American intelligence.
In September 2010, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik sent a letter to the United States Attorney General calling for repatriation of Dr Aafia Siddiqui to Pakistan. He said that the case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui had become a matter of public concern in Pakistan and her repatriation would create goodwill for the US.
Dr Aafia Siddiqui sentenced to 86 years in jail
NEW YORK: Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui was sentenced to 86 years of imprisonment by a US federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, after she was convicted of firing at US troops in Afghanistan while in their custody and other six charges brought against her.
Her lawyers had requested a sentence of 12 years, while prosecutors had pressed for a life sentence.
“It is my judgment that Dr Siddiqui is sentenced to a period of incarceration of 86 years,” said Judge Richard Berman who was in charge of the case.
Dr Aafia Siddiqui denounced the trial and said an appeal would be “a waste of time. I appeal to God.”
When her lawyer Dawn Cardi said in the court that they would appeal the sentence, Dr Siddiqui shouted “they are not my lawyers”.
During the hour-long court proceedings she said she had not been tortured in the US prison in New York but subjected to torture in Afghan prison in Bagram. Hundreds of supporters of Dr Siddiqui had gathered on the court grounds and adjoining areas protesting against her trial and conviction.
It was almost impossible to enter the court premises because of the crowd.
Last Feburary a jury found Dr Siddiqui guilty of seven charges, including two counts of attempted murder. The jury found there wasn’t premeditation in the attempted murder charges.
After the judge announced the sentence, Dr Siddiqui turned to the audience and urged the public to forgive the persons involved in the case and not to take any revenge action.
Prosecutors had alleged that Dr Siddiqui, unbeknownst to some Americans who travelled to Ghazni, was behind a curtain in the second-floor room where they gathered. She burst from behind the curtain, grabbed an American soldier’s rifle and started firing. She was shot in the abdomen by a soldier who returned fire with his sidearm, the prosecutors said.
Dr Siddiqui, who received her graduation degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University in biology and neuroscience while living in the US between 1991 and June 2002, denied grabbing the weapon or having any familiarity with firearms.
During the trial, she testified that she was simply trying to escape the room and was shot by someone who had seen her. She claimed she was concerned at the time about being transferred to a “secret” prison.
“He saw me and he got scared. He said, ‘she’s free’ or ‘she’s loose,’” she said. On Thursday, Dr Siddiqui, who has previously expressed displeasure with her lawyers and the US legal process, said that she didn’t want the lawyers on her case to file an appeal and that she didn’t want them to take any further action in her case.
Her mental state has loomed large over her trial, with her lawyers claiming she suffers from schizophrenia.
Judge Richard Berman noted on Thursday that experts for the defence and the prosecution gave conflicting opinions about her mental state and that she had been uncooperative with prison psychologists.
During the hearing, Dr Siddiqui raised her hands and shook her head several times when her lawyer Dawn Cardi argued she had a mental illness.
“I do not have any mental illness,” she said.
The judge ordered that she receive periodic mental evaluations while serving her sentence.
Agencies add:
“Don’t get angry,” Dr Siddiqui, 38, said in court to her supporters after the sentence was announced. “Forgive Judge Berman.”
Judge Berman responded, saying: “I wish more defendants would feel the way that you do.”
Before the judgment was announced, hundreds of people chanted “Free Aafia!” at a rally in Karachi and some other cities in Pakistan.
During a rambling statement to the court on Thursday, Dr Siddiqui carried only a message of peace. “I do not want any bloodshed. I do not want any misunderstanding. I really want to make peace and end the wars,” she said.
“The important part is that an appeal go forward and that those errors be addressed, because there were a lot of errors in this case,” attorney Charles Swift told journalists after the hearing.
While two of Dr Siddiqui’s children are missing — one presumed dead — one son Mohammad Ahmed, a teenager, now lives with her relatives in Karachi.
Agitation planned
The family of Dr Aafia Siddiqui vowed in Karachi on Thursday to launch a ‘movement’ to get her released from jail in America.
Fowzia Siddiqui told reporters all of Pakistan would agitate to get her sister freed. “I was alone eight years ago when I started the campaign to release my sister, but from now on it will be the Aafia movement as the whole nation is with me,” she said.
Around 200 activists from Jamaat-i-Islami and various groups gathered outside Dr Siddiqui’s Karachi home after the sentence. They chanted slogans, including “Down with America” and “Allah-o-Akbar” soon after the news of the sentence was telecast by TV channels.
Fowzia Siddiqui, a medical practitioner, criticised the government for its inability to get her sister released.
“This is a slap on our rulers and all the rulers of the Muslim Ummah. The conviction clearly shows how enslaved our government is. The previous government had sold Aafia once, but the present government has sold her time and again,” she said.
“You (the government) have shown that you are not the representatives of our people, you are traitors who have got the whole nation enslaved,” she cried.
“Aafia will certainly return sooner or later, but no one knows if our rulers will be there or not.”
Later, around 30 angry protesters burned a US flag shouting anti-US and anti-Zardari slogans.—AFP
