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.
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