A Pakistani neuroscientist held in US custody has told Sky News she has hope she will be freed after “new evidence” emerged which may suggest her innocence.
Dr Aafia Siddiqui, 52, was once one of the most wanted women in the world for her alleged links to al Qaeda‘s leadership and was jailed for 86 years in 2010 for attempting to murder an FBI agent in Afghanistan.
Dr Siddiqui, dubbed “Lady al Qaeda” by her critics, has maintained her innocence and hopes the tide could now be turning.
“I hope I am not forgotten, and I hope that one day soon I will be released,” she exclusively told Sky News, through her lawyer.
“I am… a victim of injustice, pure and simple. Every day is torture… it is not easy.”
She added: “One day, Inshallah (God-willing), I will be released from this torment.”
Dr Siddiqui’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, is calling on outgoing US President Joe Biden to issue a pardon and has submitted a 76,000-word dossier to him.
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Sky News has seen this document but has not been able to independently verify all the claims relating to Dr Siddiqui.
President Biden has until Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday to consider the family’s application. So far he has issued 39 pardons and commuted 3,989 sentences.
‘A catalogue of intelligence errors’
Mr Stafford Smith claims a catalogue of intelligence errors led to her initially becoming a suspect, citing witness testimonies that were unavailable at the time of her trial.
He alleges that, while Dr Siddiqui was visiting Pakistan in 2003, she was abducted with her three children by the country’s inter-services intelligence agency and handed to the CIA, which took her to Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
The CIA accused Dr Siddiqui of operating for al Qaeda in Afghanistan – and she was the only woman who went through its full extraordinary rendition to torture programme in the early 2000s, Mr Stafford Smith claims.
Extraordinary rendition is a process that often involves a detainee being transferred to secret detention or a third country for the purposes of interrogation.
At the time of Dr Siddiqui’s trial in 2010, the judge said: “There is no credible evidence in the record that the United States officials and/or agencies detained Dr Siddiqui” before her 2008 arrest, adding there is “no evidence in the record to substantiate these allegations or to establish them as fact”.
‘No more of a terrorist than I am’
Mr Stafford Smith says US intelligence “got the wrong end of the stick in the beginning” as agencies thought Dr Siddiqui was a nuclear physicist working on a radioactive bomb “when she really did her PhD in education”.
He says this happened as the US was “terrified of terrorists getting their hands on WMD (weapons of mass destruction), adding: “She’s no more of a terrorist than I am”.
Mr Stafford Smith, who has secured the release of 69 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, says Dr Siddiqui’s case is “one of the worst I have seen”.
The US Department of Justice told Sky News it does not comment on cases for security reasons.
The FBI also declined to comment.
‘Capable and dangerous’
CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou believed unequivocally that Dr Siddiqui had “terrorist sympathies”.
Mr Kiriakou worked for the CIA in counterterrorism until 2004 and told Sky News he “literally knew everything that the CIA was doing around the world”.
“One of the things that the CIA concentrated very heavily on in the months and years after the 9/11 attacks was the task of identifying al Qaeda’s couriers,” he said.
“We just had no clear idea how al Qaeda’s leadership was communicating.
“We had heard over the years of a woman, a female courier, Aafia Siddiqui. Many people called her Lady al Qaeda, just because we didn’t know much about her.
“Her name had popped up on many occasions.
“We would hear her name mentioned as someone who could be trusted. She was presented to us as one of the most capable and dangerous figures in that movement.”
Mr Kiriakou denies the CIA tortured Dr Siddiqui in Afghanistan while he worked for the agency, saying: “We did not torture women.”
“If Aafia Siddiqui had been captured in 2003 and had been sent to a black site, I would have known it,” he added.
“I would have briefed it to the director of the CIA. We didn’t have her.”
However, he says it was “not beneath” CIA officers “to lie in official reporting cables” and that “the CIA routinely got things wrong when it came to other high-value targets”.
‘A very bad cover-up’
Dr Siddiqui’s sister, Fowzia, says she was a “victim of the war on terror… of a very bad cover-up”.
Speaking to Sky News from her home in Karachi, Pakistan, she said Dr Siddiqui was being “victimised for what a group of fanatics did some time ago… all the innocent people who fit a certain profile have been victimised”.
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Fowzia has spent almost two decades campaigning for her sister’s freedom and helped locate and raise her children, Ahmed and Mariam, after their alleged abduction in 2003.
Dr Siddiqui’s youngest son, Suleiman, was just six months old when he was last seen around this time – and the Siddiqui family fear he was killed during the alleged abduction.
Pakistan’s inter-services intelligence has been contacted for comment.
“I know she’s innocent,” says Fowzia. “If I knew there was even a glimpse of guilt there I would not have put my whole life on hold for this. She doesn’t deserve to be where she is.”
