Some days before, I have received this SMS message from one of my close friend.
Message
“An American National Pakistani…
Ph.D having 144 honorary degrees and certificates in neurology from different institutes of the world…
The only neurologist in the world have an honorary Ph.D. from Harvard University…
Hafiz E Quran and Aalima…
Not even a single american matches her qualification.
But now she lot her memory because of the Physical, Psychological and Sexual torture that she has been subjected to. She is imprisoned with men! And we The Muslims are DEAD! Plain DEAD…”
After reading this I decided to do research on her story and what I found I want to share with you.
Bio:
She was born in city of Karachi on March 2nd, 1972. Her father Mr. Muhammad Salay Siddiqui, a British-trained neurosurgeon, an Islamic teacher, social worker, and charity volunteer. Her mother was prominent in political and religious circles and at one time a member of Pakistan's parliament. Her brother is an architect and lives in Sugarland, Texas. Her sister, Fowzia, is a Harvard-Educated neurologist and she worked at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore and taught at Johns Hopkins University before she returned to Pakistan.
Education:
Aafia attended school in Zambia until the age of eight, and finished her primary and secondary schooling in Karachi.
Aafia moved to Houston, Texas, on a student visa in 1990 joining her brother. She attended the University of Houston for three semesters, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after being awarded a full scholarship. In 1992, as a sophomore, she received a Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal "Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women". As a junior, she received a $1,200 City Days fellowship through MIT's program to help clean up Cambridge elementary school playgrounds. While she said she initially majored in Biochemical and Biophysical Studies at MIT, and reportedly initially had a triple major in biology, anthropology, and archeology, she graduated in 1995 with a B.S. in biology.
Her fellow MIT students, who lived in the dorm at the time said, "She was just nice and soft-spoken, [and not] terribly assertive."
She studied cognitive neuroscience at Brandeis University. In early 1999 while she was a graduate student, she taught General Biology Lab, a course required for undergraduate biology majors, pre-med, and pre-dental students. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 after completing her dissertation on learning through imitation; "Separating the Components of Imitation". Aafia's dissertation adviser was a Brandeis psychology professor who recalled that she wore a head scarf and thanked Allah when an experiment was successful. He said her research concerned how people learn, and did not believe it could be connected to anything that would be useful to Al-Qaeda. Aafia also co-authored a journal article on selective learning that was published in 2003.
In 1999, while living in Boston, Aafia founded the Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching as a nonprofit organization. She served as the organization's president, her husband was the treasurer, and her sister was the resident agent. She attended a mosque outside the city where she stored copies of the Quran and other Islamic literature for distribution. She also helped establish the Dawa Resource Center, a program that distributed Qurans and offered Islam-based advice to prison inmates.
Marriage and Family
In 1995 she got arranged marriage to anesthesiologist Amjad Mohammed Khan from Karachi. The couple lived first in Lexington, Massachusetts, and then in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Roxbury (in Boston), where he worked as an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She gave birth to a son, Mohammad Ahmed/Ali Hassan in 1996, and to a daughter, Mariam Bint e Muhammad, in 1998; both are American citizens. On June 26, 2002, the couple and their children returned to Pakistan. In September 2002, Aafia gave birth to the last of their three children, Suleman. The couple's divorce was finalized on October 21, 2002.
Disappearance/Missing/Kidnapped
She was engaged in Islamic charity work in the U.S. and she moved back to Pakistan in 2002. She was kidnapped with her three young children in March 2003, after the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (So-called Planer of 911 attach) .
On April 1, 2003, Pakistani newspapers reported, and Pakistan interior ministry confirmed, that a woman had been taken into custody on terrorism charges. However, a couple of days later, both the Pakistan government and the FBI publicly denied having anything to do with her disappearance. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft called her “The most wanted woman in the world”, an al-Qaeda "facilitator" who posed a "clear and present danger to the U.S." On May 26, 2004, the U.S. listed her among the seven "most wanted" al-Qaeda fugitives.
Aafia’s sister and mother denied that she had any connections to al-Qaeda, and that the U.S. detained her secretly in Afghanistan after she disappeared in Pakistan in March 2003 with her three children. They point to comments by former Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, detainees who say they believe a woman held at the prison while they were there was Aafia Siddiqui. Her sister said that Aafia Siddiqui had been raped, and tortured for five years.
Many of Aafia’s supporters, including international human rights organizations, have claimed that Aafia Siddiqui was not an extremist and that she and her young children were illegally detained, interrogated and tortured by Pakistani intelligence or U.S. authorities or both during her five-year disappearance. The U.S. and Pakistan governments have denied all such claims. According to Islamic convert Aafia Siddiqui spent those years in solitary confinement at Bagram as Prisoner 650. Six human rights groups, including Amnesty International, listed her as possibly being a "ghost prisoner" held by the U.S. Fozia claimed that she had been kidnapped by U.S. intelligence and Pakistani intelligence.
Her whereabouts remained missing for more than five years and she was shown arrested in July 2008 in Afghanistan by Afghan Police with Weapons of Mass Destruction, Bombs and, instructions on how to make machines to shoot down US Drones. At the police compound she grabbed the unattended rifle of one of her American interrogators and began shooting at them.
In April 2010, her daughter Mariam was found outside the family house wearing a collar with the address of the family home. She was said to be speaking English.
Charges/Eligations on Her
Aafia was charged on July 31, 2008, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with assault with a deadly weapon, and with attempting to kill U.S. personnel. She was flown to New York on August 6, and indicted on September 3, 2008, on two counts of attempted murder of U.S. nationals, officers, and employees, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying and using a firearm, and three counts of assault on U.S. officers and employees.
Why the U.S. may have chosen to charge her as they did, rather than for her so-called terrorism.
Trial and Sentence
Aafia's trial began in New York City on January 19, 2010. She refused to work with her lawyers because the court was not fair. She also said: "I have information about attacks, more than 9/11! ... I want to help the President to end this group, to finish them ... They are a domestic, U.S. group; they are not Muslim. She denied that she had grabbed the rifle and said she had been raped and tortured in secret prisons before her arrest by a “group of people pretending to be Americans, doing bad things in America’s name.”
During the trial, Aafia Siddiqui was removed from the court several times for repeatedly interrupting the proceedings with shouting; on being ejected, she was told by the judge that she could watch the proceedings on closed-circuit television in an adjacent holding cell. A request by the defense lawyers to declare a mistrial was turned down by the judge.
Aafia Siddiqui was sentenced to 86 years in prison by the federal judge Berman in Manhattan on September 23, 2010. Many supporters were present during the proceedings, and outside the court dozens of people rallied to demand her release. She asked the public not to take any action in retaliation.
