Crescent Magazine

California, Crescent-Online
February 4, 2010, 8:35 PST

Aafia Siddiqui, the US-educated neuroscientist who was kidnapped and held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, was found "guilty" of murder on February 3 by a US jury. She was accused of shooting and killing American soldiers at the detention centre in Ghazni province, despite the fact that prosecutors could find no forensic evidence to prove this.

Most commentators agree that the verdict is based on the media campaign of fear and suspicion orchestrated by the US Justice Department, rather than objective assessment of facts. The prosecutors did not press terrorism charges against her yet Siddiqui has been publicly branded as “Lady al Qaeda,” an extremist terrorist operative.  
The impact of the public’s exaggerated fear on the trial is reflected in the fact that even Siddiqui’s defense painted her as insane, attempting to gain reprieve based on the most inane legal loophole in the book.  

Siddiqui’s case is one of the grimmer ones to surface in the War on Terror. Widely described as a soft spoken and kind mother of three, Siddiqui is a scientist educated at Brandeis University and MIT who relocated to Pakistan after she and her husband decided that the climate in the US had become too hostile for Muslims after September  11, 2001. While in Pakistan, Siddiqui’s marriage to her husband deteriorated and they divorced on bitter terms.  
Many have speculated that the husband has played the role of informant in this case, motivated by revenge and hostility. At any rate, her husband endorses the US government’s case against her.  

On route to Rawalpindi with her three children, Siddiqui disappeared in March 2003 in Karachi. Despite frantic efforts by her mother and sister to find, no news surfaced until the episode of the Bagram base shooting in July 2008. The trial has centered on this alleged incident, charging Siddiqui with grabbing a gun and shooting Americans after she was "apprehended" in Afghanistan with "bomb making chemicals, explosives, and a map of landmarks in New York".

However, others assert that the facts diverge dramatically from this claim. Siddiqui herself asserted from the stand that these are a battery of lies. Held at the Base as Prisoner 650, she testified that she was lying on a bed behind a curtain on July 17, 2008, when she heard Afghans and American soldiers in the room discussing her removal to a secret prison. When she peeped from behind the curtain, she was shot twice in the stomach and violently thrown to the floor.

Siddiqui will be sentenced on May 6, 2010. The whereabouts of two of her three children, kidnapped alongwith her, are unknown. There is speculation that the children have been killed. One of Siddiqui’s sons was released and now lives with Aafia’s sister, Dr Fauzia, in Pakistan.

END