Family’s despair for Pakistan’s Aafia Siddiqui

Fowzia Siddiqui, sister of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist who is currently serving a prison term in the US, gestures as she gives an interview to AFP at her home in Karachi.-AFP

Karachi: From Algeria to Iraq to Yemen, one name crops up again and again in the demands of militant hostage-takers: Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani scientist jailed in the United States for attacking American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Militant groups have sought the 42-year-old’s release in exchange for captives, most recently the US journalist James Foley, beheaded by ISIS in August.

In an interview with AFP in Karachi, Siddiqui’s family protested her innocence and despaired at the horrors associated with her name.

According to US court papers, she was carrying two kilos of sodium cyanide hidden in moisturiser bottles, along with plans for chemical weapons and New York’s Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building.

The Afghans handed her to US forces who began questioning her. During her interrogation she grabbed a rifle and opened fire, according to witnesses. The soldiers escaped unhurt, but she was injured.

From Afghanistan, Siddiqui was put on trial in the US and sentenced in 2010 to 86 years for attempted murder — and not for any Al Qaeda links.

Much about the case remains unclear — where was Siddiqui between her disappearance in 2003 and reappearance in 2008?

Even the US trial judge Richard Berman acknowledged in his verdict that it had “never definitely been established why Dr Siddiqui and her son were in Afghanistan”.

According to her family, Siddiqui and her three children — Ahmed, Mariam and little Suleiman, then six months old and today dead — were about to leave their house in the posh Gulshan-e-Iqbal district of Karachi for the airport when they were apprehended.

“When Aafia left, couple of hours or so later, there was a knock at the door. My mom walked to the gate and asked ‘who is it?’” Fowzia Siddiqui, Aafia’s sister told AFP.

“He... said something like: ‘If you say anything or report this to the police, you will have four dead bodies’.”

At her trial in New York in 2010 — her only public appearance since 2003 — she said she was detained for a “long time” in a “secret prison” in Afghanistan.

Her supporters said she was the “ghost prisoner” in Bagram, serial number 650, but this is denied by the US.

There was little in Siddiqui’s upbringing in an elite family to suggest her life would pan out as it has.

After a childhood split between Pakistan and Zambia, the 18-year-old Siddiqui travelled to Texas, where her brother lived, before studying at Boston’s prestigious MIT and doing a PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis University.

In the 1990s, her family arranged a marriage for her with Amjad Khan, a Karachi doctor who joined her in the US.

Some US officials believe Siddiqui was with Al Qaeda since her time in America and spent 2003-2008 in Afghanistan with the family of Baluchi, who was arrested in 2003 and interned in Guantanamo.

Her family deny this, while General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler at the time, said he would not have handed a Pakistani over to the US.

“Our views were clear: no Pakistani will ever be handed over to anyone — that was our policy and we followed it very strictly,” Musharraf told AFP.