Mystery Surrounds Terror Suspect's Vanished Years

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From 'TheAge.com.au': Aafia Siddiqui cut a ghostly figure in a New York court during the first week in August — not surprisingly for someone who during five years seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. US prosecutors say Siddiqui, 36, is a desperate would-be terrorist who was arrested in Afghanistan, and on July 18th of this year she opened fire on US Army and FBI officers before being shot, wounded and subdued. But the only thing that seems sure, given her obvious frailty, was that she had recently been shot. The wound, her lawyer Elizabeth Fink said, was still "oozing".


Aafia Siddiqui

Nothing else has been clear about the US-educated Pakistani neuroscientist since March 2003, when she disappeared in Karachi along with her three children, then aged seven, five and six months. No one has explained where Siddiqui, a diminutive woman who was once a star student at top US universities, has been for the past five years. No one has explained where her children are now. "These are the two key questions," said Joanne Mariner, counterterrorism expert at Human Rights Watch in New York. "It's really, really mysterious."

Living in the US at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she was briefly detained over her support for Islamic charities, which was seen as suspicious. She was never charged. In 2003, alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed named her under interrogation and in 2004 she appeared on a US list of alleged al-Qaeda operatives. Yet Mohammed's testimony has since been discredited by revelations that he was tortured in US custody.

Prosecutors in New York are charging her with assault and attempted murder, but they are not linking her to al-Qaeda. Defence lawyers claim the alleged shoot-out with FBI and US Army officers in Afghanistan was invented to cover up the truth about Siddiqui's disappearance into a secret US prison system. A brilliant graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, near Boston, Siddiqui is far from a typical al-Qaeda suspect. But Sam Zarifi, Asia director for Amnesty International, says that hundreds of people in US custody disappeared into a legal vacuum and that Siddiqui may have been sucked in, too.

Relatives believe that after leaving her parents' house in Karachi, she and her children were kidnapped, handed to US forces and imprisoned illegally at the Bagram base in Afghanistan. Defence lawyers said they had had too little time to find out from her what had happened. Some human rights activists believe she was none other than Bagram's near-legendary "prisoner 650", the sole female inmate at the base, who other detainees claim to have heard screaming. Siddiqui is said to have first been apprehended in Afghanistan with a bag full of suspicious liquids in glass containers — but whether the liquids were dangerous is not stated.

In the alleged struggle at a police station, prosecutors indicate they do not know how many rounds Siddiqui allegedly fired, or even how many bullets struck her. Defence lawyers also want to know under what jurisdiction Siddiqui was held between the alleged July 18th incident and August 4th, when prosecutors say she was formally arrested and flown to the US. So far, Siddiqui has revealed little. Asked by the judge at her initial hearing this week whether she understood the charges, she answered: "Yes". Then she shook her head.