Ever since Dr Aafia Siddiqui was convicted in New York of assault and attempted murder of US soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, a segment of the Pakistani media has hailed her as a martyr. In Washington, by contrast, US Attorney General Eric Holder cited her trial as proof that, despite al Qaeda’s emotion-provoking and deceptive tactics, America’s civilian courts are capable of taking terrorists to task. Aafia’s supporters accuse Washington and its Pakistani allies of framing the scientist in Afghanistan after secretly imprisoning her for five years as part of the war against terror. Yet, Washington claims she spent those years on the run, after the FBI listed her in 2003 as ‘wanted for questioning’ and a year later in 2004 among the ‘FBI Most Wanted’ for connections with al Qaeda.
Her trial did little to answer key questions, such as why was Aafia listed on the ‘FBI Most Wanted’ and why was she not charged with terrorism in her trial now? Facts by intelligence sources solve the mystery.
Published reports agree that Aafia studied in Boston for 10 years, five prior to her marriage in 1995 to her first husband, Dr Amjad Khan. Even prior to her arrival in America, she had close family ties with Gen Ziaul Haq’s family and their jihadist/al Qaeda contacts during the Afghan-Soviet war.She affiliated herself with Boston’s radical organisations when the war in Iraq and then in Bosnia started in 1991-92. She participated in recruiting students and raising funds for these organisations and in delivering speeches in Qaeda’s support. All these activities were entirely legal under US freedom of speech and civil laws. That’s precisely why despite the FBI’s knowledge of such activities no action could be taken until Washington had evidence that members of these organisations took steps against America.
Aafia’s first husband joined her in Boston after their 1995 marriage. In his referenced interviews,
Amjad has acknowledged that he was coerced by his wife to not only look after their children, but also provide other kinds of support while she spent her time as a member of these Islamic charities – a chore Amjad unhappily fulfilled by sacrificing his own medical training and academic commitments for the sake of his marriage.
Much to the chagrin of the Siddiqui family, Amjad, after completing his specialisation from the US, divorced Aafia in August 2002, and married, in September 2002, a girl of his choice. So why did Aafia get deeper into trouble while Amjad was cleared by the FBI? That question has dodged many truth-seekers, mainly because investigative reports from 2003-08 were one-sided, with only
Aafia’s family’s vindictive versions being presented, while Amjad’s family assumed a silence.American intelligence officials say just prior to their divorce,
the FBI Boston had interviewed the couple in May 2002, as part of a post 9/11 investigation into the organizations that Aafia belonged to. FBI agents have stated that Aafia was the focus of the interview and its purpose was information gathering and cross verification. Amjad had made Internet purchases of hunting/out-door equipment and a civilian night vision scope, which, the FBI said, was not of concern after it was established that the purchases were legal and that the gear was for personal use. To avoid any future trouble, he had returned the night vision scope and certain books he had ordered, before he finally left the US, even though the FBI had allowed him to keep them.
According to James Merberg, the couple’s US lawyer, who assisted them with their first FBI interview, Amjad came through clean during his questioning,
but Aafia deliberately and mockingly gave false and misleading answers to several questions. This is where Aafia’s troubles started, because lying to the FBI is a crime punishable under US law.
Officials of the FBI Boston have said Aafia aroused further suspicion in 2002 after the couple left the US in the midst of their routine investigation, prompting them to be placed on the “Aviation Watch List”.
Amjad has told a Pakistani joint interrogation team Aafia had a violent and extremist mentality and constantly tried to manipulate him, and that she was hysterically adamant on leaving the US because she was paranoid about the FBI harming her due to her al Qaeda connections. Amjad had to destroy his career when he decided to leave with his wife and children. But, he left because at that stage he just had to divorce Aafia, in Pakistan, with the consent of his parents.
A Pakistani intelligence officer assigned to the case revealed that the factual reason the couple was named on the global “wanted for questioning” alert in March 2003, had nothing to do with Aafia’s or Amjad’s activities while they were married and in the US.
He says the alert was actually in response to Aafia’s seven-day trip for an al Qaeda mission to Baltimore, US, alone in January 2003, after she was divorced by Amjad, but using a visa sponsored by him as his wife. She tried to help an al Qaeda member Majid Khan gain re-entry to the US by pretending that Majid was still in the US when she mailed his visa renewal application to the US Immigration Service, and also opened a PO Box for the receipt of his visa documents. “Because Aafia was on the ‘watch list’, the FBI was informed by the FIA as soon as she boarded the flight and her movements were closely followed while she was in the US,” disclosed the official.
The FBI investigation that followed, uncovered a ring of al Qaeda members, including Aafia’s second husband Ammar Balochi, Uzair Paracha and Khalid Sheikh, all of whom were subsequently arrested. Their interrogation revealed that they had conspired to use Majid for bombing gas stations and underwater traffic tunnels in Baltimore. Because Aafia had made the trip on a visa as Amjad’s wife, the FBI didn’t know about their divorce and issued the global ‘wanted for questioning’ alert for both of them.
After the alert, Amjad volunteered to be interviewed by the FBI and was jointly interrogated by the FBI Baltimore and the ISI in March 2003, and was cleared. His name was thus taken off the FBI’s website and list.
Amjad informed the investigators about his divorce and ignorance about Aafia’s subsequent contacts and activities. Soon after the interview, Amjad took up a job as a consultant at a prestigious hospital in Saudi Arabia.An ISI officer, privy to the case, confided that Aafia, after her divorce in August 2002, had contacted Khalid Sheikh (the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind) and had volunteered her services. That’s how she got recruited for the Baltimore bombing plot. After she returned from her Baltimore trip, Khalid arranged her second marriage in February 2003 in Karachi to his nephew Ammar Balochi. Soon thereafter, Khalid, Majid and Ammar (accused of financing 9/11) all got arrested, were interrogated and then transferred to the Guantanamo Bay and are currently awaiting trial.
The ISI says Aafia was offered an interview with the FBI under ISI protection, in response to the 2003 ‘wanted for questioning alert’ to get herself cleared.
But she refused and decided to go underground instead. The media then started circulating unfounded and conflicting stories about Aafia’s capture, along with her three children, and her handover to the FBI, with some of these ostensible claims attributed to the officials of Pakistan’s Interior Ministry. When Amjad contacted the FBI and the US ambassador, he was told “neither Aafia nor your children were ever arrested, no reward has been offered for Aafia’s arrest and the search for her is still on”.
The ISI was actually directed by the Siddiqui family’s close friend and then minister Ijazul Haq to protect Aafia and to conceal her whereabouts from the FBI.Dr Faisal Qureshi, an International Relations scholar at the Bowling Green University, believes the media confusion in 2003 about Aafia’s arrest was a deliberate but misguided effort to get the FBI off her trail. But, the plan backfired when US Attorney General Ashcroft, and FBI Director Muller, as a consequence of Islamabad’s apparent unwillingness to locate and provide the required information about Aafia, listed her among the ‘FBI Most Wanted’ in May 2004. Washington feared al Qaeda could capitalise on the confusion in the media to use her for new terror plots.
Two days later, then interior minister Faisal Hayat admitted that “Aafia had neither been arrested nor handed over to the US” and dismissed the previous statements attributed to bureaucrats as “baseless and concocted”. Aafia’s fate, and with her that of the Pakistani intelligence agencies, had been sealed – she had become the “Most Wanted Woman in the World”. According to Dr Qureshi, a more prudent approach for Pakistani politicians would have been to admit back in 2003 that Aafia doesn’t want to provide information against her associates in the Baltimore terror plot, and that she will remain in Pakistan under ISI protection. Aafia herself corroborated this, in her confession statement to FBI agents, after her arrest in Afghanistan in July 2008, that she was free and living in Pakistan under ISI surveillance during the ‘missing’ years.
Why was Aafia not charged with terrorism during her trial? Diplomat Fakir Hussain provided the answer to journalists present in the courtroom, where Aafia was being tried. Hussain had accompanied Ambassador Haqqani for his meeting about the case with the US attorney general and said Washington’s aim was to bring Aafia to justice, and they could easily manage that with the attempted murder charges.
“Although she was a co-conspirator in the Baltimore terror plot, convicting her on terrorism charges would require bringing Majid, Khalid and Ammar to the stand, and Washington doesn’t want to do that until a final decision about the nature of the trial of these three is made,” Hussain said. Regardless, Washington achieved its objective of convicting the “grey lady of al Qaeda”, who was so committed to its cause that she threw away her education, destroyed her marriage and put her children in harms way.
And that is published on July 10th 2010..
STUPID LADY foolishly get brain washed by religious rogues... Ph. D, MIT.. she could have done so much to Muslim ladies.. fool become pawn in the hands of religious rogues..
Topic: Aafia Siddiqui (pbuh)