Dr. Aafia Siddiqui: Next Court Date September 22
A senior Pakistani Embassy diplomat met with Dr. Aafia Siddqui in the Brooklyn detention center on Saturday after U. S. authorities agreed to Pakistan’s request for consular access.
Many say she was the only female prisoner, ‘Prisoner 650’, held at the U.S. detention center 60 kilometers from Kabul.
One of her lawyers, Gideon Oliver, and a U.S. representative, were also present during Counselor Faqir Asif Hussain’s meeting with Dr. Aafia, as she is referred to in Pakistan.
Afterwards, Faqir Asif Hussain said he assured Dr. Aafia that the embassy would make every possible effort to ensure that she was not discriminated against and that efforts would be made to ensure that she was provided appropriate medical treatment.
She asked that her government to make sure that her trial is fair.
Dr. Aafia also requested that she be provided halal food and a copy of the Quran and local timings for prayers as well as a good female doctor. The Pakistani diplomat conveyed these requests to the U.S. authorities who promised to provide them for her. She was transported to the United States last week on charges of shooting at U.S. soldiers while in detention in Afghanistan. The American prosecutor says that she could have used her knowledge of the United States to support terrorists trying to slip into the country and plot attacks. She is being held without bail.
Her sister Fauzia said last week that her sibling was innocent and accused U.S. forces of secretly holding her for the last five years.
“What a mockery that after five years in detention Aafia is suddenly discovered in Afghanistan,” her younger sister Fauzia Siddiqui, who is a medical doctor, told a news conference in Karachi. “I decided to break my silence to say that one is innocent until proven guilty. My sister is innocent. Aafia was tortured for five years until one day U.S. authorities announce that they have found her in Afghanistan, which shows how they abused their power and tortured an innocent woman without committing any crime.”
Dr. Aafia, born in 1972, into a well-to-do family. She obtained a biology degree in the United States at MIT and later a doctorate from Brandeis University, in neurological science. She disappeared in 2003 after returning to Pakistan and then was added to the list of most dangerous Al-Qaeda suspects compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2004. She was also included in a list published by Amnesty International in June 2007 as someone for whom there was “evidence of secret detention by the United States and whose fate and whereabouts remain unknown.”
Several former prisoners including British Muslim Moazzam Begg, who was held at Bagram before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and later released, tell the story of prisoner number 650, the only woman at Bagram. Their accounts claimed that the detained woman cried all the time and appeared to have lost her sanity.
