Dr. Aafia Siddiqui met her sister after long 20 years on Wednesday. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani citizen and a neuroscientist. She had been convicted in Manhattan in 2010 on charges that she sought to shoot U.S. military officers. While being detained in Afghanistan two years earlier.
After an unbearable wait of 20 years. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui finally got to meet her sister Dr Fouzia Siddiqui in the Fort Worth town of the United States, where Dr Aafia is currently detained. Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan of the Jamat-e-Islami (JI) and British attorney Clive Stafford Smith accompanied Dr. Fouzia Siddiqui during her meeting with Dr. Aafia.
In a tweet, Senator Mushtaq narrated the horrific sufferings that Dr. Aafia has to through each day. The meeting between both the sisters lasted for two and a half hours. Dr Fauzia wasn’t allowed to hug or shake hands with her sister as the meeting took place inside a jail room with a thick glass between them.
For an hour and a half, Dr. Aafia shared the details of the torture she was going through every day. Her front teeth were knocked out/lost due to an attack in prison. The senator revealed that she also had difficulty hearing due to a head injury.
The scientist ‘disappeared’ in 2003 and was later revealed to be in US custody. Her sister has campaigned for government efforts to bring her back for years.
Who is the grim prisoner?
A US-educated Pakistani scientist, Dr Aafia Siddiqui was jailed in 2010 for 86 years by a New York federal district court in September 2008 on charges of attempted murder and assault, stemming from an incident during an interview with the US authorities in Ghazni, Afghanistan — charges that she denied.
She was the first woman to be suspected of Al-Qaeda links by the US, but never convicted of it.
But after the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001. She came up on the FBI’s radar for donations to Islamic organisations and was linked to the purchase of $10,000 worth of night-vision goggles and books on warfare.
She disappeared in around 2003, along with her three children, in Karachi.
Five years later she turned up in Pakistan’s war-torn neighbors Afghanistan. Where she was arrested by local forces in the restive southeastern province of Ghazni.