One more Pakistani in FBI list

:mad: Dr Aafia was handed over to US last year: govt


By Our Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD, May 28: An interior ministry spokesman on Friday confirmed that Dr Aafia Siddiqui, allegedly involved in terrorist activities, had been arrested in 2003 from Karachi and handed over to the US authorities.

Dr Aafia, having dual Pakistani-American nationalities, holds a doctorate in neurological sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The spokesman told this correspondent that Dr Aafia had been handed over to the US because she had "kept her US nationality".

Otherwise, the spokesman said, no Pakistani involved in any activity had so far been handed over to the US by the present government. An FBI report showed Dr Aafia, 32, to be one of the seven dangerous terrorists who planned a new attack on the US.

The interior ministry spokesman said Dr Aafia was also wanted in Pakistan because of the country being one of the major coalition partners of the US in the war against terrorism.

The FBI report claimed Dr Aafia to be still in Pakistan but the interior ministry spokesman said that she was in the US custody. Another interior ministry official said Pakistani intelligence agencies had interrogated her but her links with Al Qaeda could not be established.

He said in the US, Dr Aafia was accused of delivering anti-US speeches and "preaching jihad". Later, she was declared a "dangerous terrorist" by the FBI. The same official confirmed that Dr Aafia had visited Pakistan in 2003 and had spent a few days in Islamabad. She is stated to be an award winning student of the MIT.

A statement issued by Dr Aafia's father, published in the press during March 2004, said she had studied in the MIT for 10 years and obtained her PhD and returned to Pakistan in 2002.

He said that she had again gone to the US and returned to the country in February 2003 after renting a post office box in her name in Maryland. He alleged that Dr Aafia had been kidnapped in Karachi along with her three children aged between three-and-a-half months to seven years from March 25 to March 31, 2003.

Dr Aafia's father had ridiculed the FBI's allegations, saying that the agency had all of a sudden declared her to be an Al Qaeda leader besides accusing her of supporting other "operatives of this group" entering the US.

The FBI claimed that she had hired the post office box for one Majid Khan, an alleged member of Al Qaeda, residing in Baltimore.

In 2003, Dr Fawzia, Dr Aafia's elder sister along with the minister for religious affairs Ijazul Haq had called on interior minister Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat in Islamabad to know the whereabouts of her sister.

On this occasion, the interior minister was quoted by her father as saying: "According to my information, Dr Aafia has already been released and Dr Fawzia should wait for her sister's call at home."

BOSTON: Relatives of Pakistani terror suspect Aafia Siddiqui, who is being hunted worldwide by police and intelligence agencies, say they do not know where she is and are worried about her, according to a lawyer for the family.

The family is “extremely distressed by Aafia’s disappearance, and are desperate to speak with Aafia, if she is still alive,” Elaine Whitfield Sharp said in a statement issued on Friday. The family believes the use of terrorism and the avowed purposes of Al Qaeda are “abhorrent and inhumane” and it does not believe that Siddiqui would “knowingly be involved in a group as sadistic as Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organisation,” Sharp said. Siddiqui is among seven people wanted for questioning by the Justice Department after authorities said they received credible intelligence reports pointing to a possible terror attack in the United States this summer. Officials say the 32-year-old Siddiqui returned to Pakistan shortly after the Sept 11 attacks with her husband, Mohammed Khan, and three children. Her whereabouts have been a mystery since March 2003, when the FBI issued a global alert for her arrest for possible links to Al Qaeda. The FBI also wants to talk to Khan, whom Siddiqui has divorced, according to relatives.

Siddiqui’s relatives said they have not seen her in more than a year. Sharp said in the statement that Siddiqui’s mother voluntarily met with federal agents and prosecutors in the United States last year. Siddiqui’s brother and sister also met with federal officials and cooperated fully. “As always, the Siddiqui family remains willing to cooperate with law enforcement,” the statement said. Sharp said none of the family members wanted to be interviewed by the media, and declined to name them.

Siddiqui’s brother and sister have been identified in media reports as Muhammad and Fowzia Siddiqui, an architect who lives in Texas and a doctor. Messages left at listings for Muhammad Siddiqui in Houston weren’t immediately returned Friday. Siddiqui’s mother, Ismat, reportedly lives in Karachi. Siddiqui, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, was an activist in the Boston-area Islamic community. A senior Pakistani security official told The Associated Press this week that the United States had made no new request for Pakistan to find Siddiqui but one issued last year was still in effect. She had gone underground, the official said, and it was not known if she was still in Pakistan. ap

Probably disappeared into one of those "third" (Jordan, Egypt, Israel, SA, etc.) countries that CIA uses to extract information using methods that it officially does not approves.

By Mark Wilkinson

BOSTON, June 1 (Reuters) - A woman who the U.S. government suspects is an al Qaeda operative was not involved with the group and may be dead, detained in Pakistan or kidnapped by her former husband, a lawyer for her family said on Tuesday.

The FBI is looking for Aafia Siddiqui, 32, a Pakistani behavioral scientist who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University outside Boston, the law enforcement agency said last week.

"Her family does not believe she is involved in any nefarious or sinister act connected to al Qaeda or any other sadistic terrorist group," attorney Elaine Whitfield Sharp told a news conference.

Sharp said Siddiqui's family denied "misperceptions in the media that she might have worked on a neurobiological or neurological weapons development program."

At Brandeis, Siddiqui studied how the brain used visual cues and memory to learn new tasks. The goal of the research was to help children with learning disabilities, said Sharp.

FBI chief Robert Mueller described Siddiqui as an al Qaeda operative and facilitator and said she was one of seven sought in connection with "possible terrorist threats" in the United States.

The family did not know where Siddiqui was or if she was indeed still alive, and said it was possible that her ex-husband Muhammad Amjad Kahn, a former Boston doctor now back in Pakistan, had kidnapped her and the couple's three children, said the lawyer.

Siddiqui's former co-workers and family members told Sharp that Kahn abused her when the couple lived in Boston. He divorced her in the summer of 2002, and the two fought over whether their three young children would be reared in the United States or Pakistan.

Siddiqui vanished with them in March of last year and has since not been heard of or seen by the family.

Her mother, Ismet Siddiqui, was the last to see her as she and her children got in a cab in Karachi. She had planned to take the children to Islamabad to visit an uncle and get away from her ex-husband, Sharp told Reuters.

"She was concerned because Kahn's family is very powerful," Sharp said. "They have a compound with a wall around it. Is she there alive, is she dead and buried behind those walls? We don't know. Is she in Pakistani or U.S. custody? We don't know."

There were no family members at the press conference. Siddiqui has a brother in Houston but her mother lives in Karachi. The father is dead.



06/01/04 18:14 ET