Home
Delicious
Digg
Facebook
Reddit
Stumble Upon
Technorati
Mixx
Sphinn
Twitter
SphereIt
Propeller
Gmarks
Newsvine
Yahoo! My Web
Live Journal
Blinklist
E-mail
Dr. Afia Siddiqui has become another point of resentment and hatred against the Pakistani Government as well as the US Government in Pakistan. She was an MIT trained neuro scientist of Pakistani origin and was wanted by the FBI for questioning without any charges against her. Basically she was a person of interest. In march 2003 she went missing with her three American born children while visiting her mother in Pakistan. At that time it was widely speculated that she had been arrested by Pakistani Intelligence agencies and handed over to the US forces. Both the Pakistani government and the US government denied any knowledge of her whereabouts at the time and have been denying the same since. She became of the hundreds “missing persons” that went missing and were turned over to the US forces illegally against all norms of civilization and established international regulations.
Today it has been confirmed that Dr. Afia indeed is in US custody and has been since her disappearance, she is being held at the US detention facility at Baghram in Afghanistan, the whereabouts of her children are unknown. No charges have been filed against her and she is said to have gone senile and cries all the time. The news has stirred emotions in people who want to know why Dr. Afia was arrested and handed over by Pakistani forces, what happened to her children and what is her state. It is shameful that the government of Pakistan and the FBI had denied all knowledge of her arrest for so long and are still mute on a lot of issues including the whereabouts of her children.
The following poem by Mr. Hassan Abbas has been making rounds of blogs in Pakistan.
A Glorious Dawn…And A Better Day
To Dr.Afia Siddiqui - prisoner # 650 in American custody
Another dawn …another day,
Disgrace; insult is thrown our way;
Yet shamelessly on their golden perch
The spineless look - Oh how they sway!
As if there is no Lord above,
They with the devil-hand in glove;
Selling our dearest values and souls,
For gold and power – push and shove!
This crime you saw they so denied,
To filthy scum they sold the bride;
Yet the mighty Creator seeing it all
Unveils the gruesome act they hide!
Amongst ravenous wolves the fair one lies,
As from brutish hands she helplessly flies;
A suffering sister sane no more,
Her anguished screams - they rent the skies.
And this is all the pride you boast,
Our tormentors you daily host !
Comrades but yesterday we shared the cup,
- And today so far apart we coast ?
When comes a ‘Qasim’ to stem this rot?
Of Almighty Allah and His Messenger forgot!
Of cheaply selling our heritage which -
With submission and sacrifice was dearly bought.
And yet the strong will go their way,
As an ‘Iftikhar’ keep the monsters at bay;
Afia! Our elders pray, while our braver fight ,
For a glorious dawn…….. and a better day!
)
)
)
RSS 
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
){kind=link}
1.Dr. Afia Siddiqui left her house in Karachi, along with her three children, in a Metro-cab on March 30, 2003 to catch a flight for Rawalpindi. She never reached the airport. Press reports suggested that she was handed over to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
2.At the time of her arrest she was 30 years and the mother of three sons the oldest of whom was four and the youngest only one month.
3.A few days NBC, reported that Afia had been arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of facilitating money transfers for terror networks of Osama Bin Laden.But on April 1, 2003, a small news item was published in a press conference the then Interior Minister of Pakistan Faisal Saleh Hayat denied that she had been arrested.
4.Whilst Dr. Afia’s whereabouts remained unknown, Britain’s Lord Nazeer Ahmed, (of the House of Lords), asked questions in the House about the condition of a women Prisoner 650 who, according to him is physically tortured and continuously raped by the officers at prison. Lord Nazeer also submitted that Prisoner 650 had no separate toilet facilities and had to attend to her bathing and movements in full view of the other prisoners.
5.Also, on July 6, 2008 a British journalist, Yvonne Ridley, called for help for a Pakistani woman held in isolation by the Americans in their Bagram detention centre in Afghanistan, for over four years. “I call her the ‘grey lady’ because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continues to haunt those who heard her,” .She said the case came to her attention when she read the book, The Enemy Combatant, by a former Kandahar , Bagram and Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg.
6.Dr. Afia Siddiqui, studied at MIT for about 10 years and did her PhD in genetics, returned to Pakistan in 2002. Having failed to get a suitable job, she again visited the US on a valid visa in February 2003 to search for a job . She came back to Karachi by the end of February 2003 after renting a post office box in her name in Maryland for the receipt of her mail. It has been claimed by the FBI (Newsweek International, June 23, 2003, issue -exclusively devoted to Al Qaeda) that the box was hired for one Mr Majid Khan, an alleged member of Al Qaeda residing in Baltimore.
7.Suddenly BBC Urdu reported it had received an email from Dr.Afia’s( hired by her brother) that on Thursday an agent from the FBI came to the brothers house and admitted to the fact that Dr. Afia is indeed in solitary confinement within a prison in Afghanistan and in serious medical condition
8. According to www.teeth.com a leading Pakistani blog,”The admittance may well be attributed to the immense media pressure created when a number of human rights organizations presented evidence of a certain prisoner-of-war known as Prisoner 650 who was in terrible medical condition within an American prison located in Afghanistan and they had reason to suspect that Prisoner 650 was Dr. Afia Siddiqui”.
9.Today’s Dawn(Pakistan’s leading English newspaper) carries this report: Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-educated Pakistani woman,has been brought to New York to face charges that she tried to kill U.S. agents and military officers during an interrogation in Afghanistan.Siddiqui, 36, was stopped by Afghan police on July 17(2008?!-query mine)) outside a government building, according to a criminal complaint. Police searched her handbag and discovered documents containing recipes for explosives and chemical weapons and describing “various landmarks in the United States, including New York City,” according to the complaint, which did not identify the landmarks. The next day, as a team of FBI agents and U.S. military officers prepared to question her, Siddiqui grabbed a rifle, pointed it at an army captain and yelled that she wanted blood, prosecutors said. An interpreter pushed the rifle aside as she fired two shots, which missed, they said. One of two shots fired by a soldier in response hit her in the torso. Even after being hit, Siddiqui struggled and shouted in English “that she wanted to kill Americans” before the officers subdued her, the complaint said.
10.Aafia’s family attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp,called the charges “a tall story.”
11.At the time of the incident, Afghan officials gave conflicting accounts of what transpired. U.S. military officials declined comment.
The above is offered to enable the readers to decide for themselves if the lawyer is correct.
Note: All reports are taken from www.teeth.com