For five years no one would say for certain whether Aafia Siddiqui, a mother of three with a PhD from an elite university in the US, was alive or dead. Her family did not know and authorities in Pakistan and the US were not saying.
On Tuesday, as Siddiqui was produced before a court in New York to face charges of attacking US army officers in Afghanistan last month, that central mystery was resolved.
The Pakistani-American Muslim, once named by the US authorities as a key al-Qaeda operative, is indeed alive and now in US custody.
But almost nothing can be said for certain about her whereabouts since March 2003 when she was last seen climbing into a taxi with her three children in Pakistan’s biggest city, Karachi.
Some campaigners believe Siddiqui was snatched by Pakistani intelligence agencies, passed to the Americans and held in solitary confinement at the US base in Bagram, Afghanistan. There she acquired mythical status — prisoner 650 — whose wails haunted other inmates.
But the US, which has made multiple allegations against Siddiqui over the years, depicting her as a courier of blood diamonds and a financial fixer for al-Qaeda, has denied holding her, raising the question where has she been for five years.
Siddiqui’s lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, told CNN the scenario was utterly implausible.
“This is a very intelligent woman.” Sharp said. “The woman is a PhD. Is a woman like this really that stupid? There is an incongruity and I have trouble accepting the government’s claims.”
Yesterday Afghan police in Ghazni, Pakistan, offered another competing version of her detention, saying that the US troops had demanded she be handed over. When Afghan police refused, they were disarmed. The Americans shot at Siddiqui, thinking she was a suicide bomber. A teenage boy who was with Siddiqui remained in Afghan police custody.
Before yesterday’s court appearance in New York, Siddiqui was last seen heading for Karachi’s railway station where, along with her three children, then seven, five and six months old, she planned to catch a train to visit an uncle in Islamabad.
Her life before that was exemplary by any accounts. She had studied in the US, earning a degree from MIT before moving on to a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Brandeis University. She was married — unhappily — to a Pakistani.
Acquaintances over her years in Boston have described her commitment to Islam. She returned to Pakistan in 2002, where her marriage broke up and she was living with her family at the time of her disappearance. Siddiqui’s relatives believe that she was abducted by Pakistani intelligence agents and later transferred to US custody.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person