The trial of a Pakistani neuroscientist educated in the US and accused of trying to kill US personnel in Afghanistan was to start yesterday in New York.
US authorities say Aafia Siddiqui, 37, is an al-Qaeda-linked, would-be terrorist who tried to murder US officers on July 18, 2008, after she was detained by security services in Afghanistan.
Siddiqui is refusing to cooperate with the court and has made repeated outbursts during pre-trial hearings and jury selection.
Last week she was ordered to be removed from the courtroom after she interrupted proceedings to tell prospective jurors that she had nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and that Israel was responsible.
She also said she did not want Jews serving on the jury.
A judge ruled in July last year that Siddiqui was mentally fit to stand trial, overruling arguments by her lawyers that she suffered from disturbing hallucinations while in pre-trial detention.
However, a year and a half after being brought to the US, much remains mysterious, even bizarre, in Siddiqui’s case.
A brilliant graduate from the top-ranked Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, near Boston, Siddiqui makes an unusual suspect in what Washington calls “the war on terror.”
The frail-looking woman appeared on a 2004 US list of people suspected of links to al-Qaeda and is alleged to have married a relative of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks.
However, despite being dubbed “Lady Qaeda” by parts of the US media, she has never been charged with terrorism.
The allegation is that she was detained by Afghan forces in the provincial town of Ghazni who found on her notes referring to a “mass casualty attack” and a list of New York landmarks including the Statue of Liberty.
Then, during her detention, she allegedly seized a visiting US serviceman’s rifle and opened fire, missed, and was shot in return fire.
When she was brought to New York custody shortly after, she was nursing a fresh bullet wound in her abdomen.
The biggest mystery about Siddiqui, say human rights groups, is her whereabouts during the five years prior to the alleged 2008 assault in the Afghan town.
Siddiqui was living in her homeland of Pakistan when she vanished in March 2003. This was at a time of intense efforts by US-backed Pakistani security forces to root out al-Qaeda and relatives believe she was grabbed in one of these operations.
Where she went then, nobody knows.
Some human rights activists have speculated that Siddiqui vanished into secret US custody and may even have been the legendary “prisoner 650” at the Bagram base — a solitary woman inmate whom other detainees claim to have heard screaming.
The US military has denied this, saying the allegation was “unfounded.”
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