The Secret Prisoner
On March 1, 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, was arrested in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi -- the biggest catch to date in the battle against al-Qaida. He was interrogated by the CIA at an undisclosed location, where he revealed aspects of the inner world of internal terrorism. A series of arrests began a short time later, and it is believed that Mohammed also mentioned Siddiqui's name. For the CIA, any name Mohammed mentioned was automatically an important al-Qaida terrorist.On that same March 1, Siddiqui sent an email from Karachi to her professor, Robert Sekuler, at Brandeis University outside Boston. She was looking for a job. "I would prefer to work in the United States," she wrote, noting that there were no jobs in Karachi for a woman with her educational background. A few days later, Siddiqui disappeared. Early in the morning on the day of her disappearance, she left her parents' house, together with her three children and not very much luggage. She took a taxi to the airport to catch a morning flight to Islamabad, where she had planned to visit her uncle.Siddiqui says she was kidnapped that day, on her way to the airport. She says her abductors took away Ahmed, Mariam and the baby. The last thing she remembers, she says, was receiving an injection in her arm. She says that when she regained consciousness she was in a prison cell, which she believes was on a military base in Afghanistan, because she heard aircraft taking off and landing. She claims that she was held in solitary confinement for more than five years, and that it was always the same Americans who interrogated her, without masks or uniforms. For days, she says, they would play tape recordings of her children's terrified screams, and she claims that she was forced to write hundreds of pages about the construction of dirty bombs and attacks using viruses. The baby, Suleman, was taken away immediately, she says. They showed her a photograph of Ahmed, the seven-year-old, lying in a pool of blood. The only one of her children they occasionally showed her, she says, was Mariam -- as a vague outline behind a pane of frosted glass.
Could this story be true?
Several Pakistani media outlets did report her arrest. A year after her disappearance, Dawn, a daily newspaper normally considered to have good sources, quoted a spokesman from the Pakistani interior ministry saying that Siddiqui was arrested in Karachi and later handed to the Americans. On April 21, 2003, the US television network NBC ran a story about Siddiqui's arrest on the evening news.Pakistani intelligence sources report that Siddiqui was in Pakistani detention until the end of 2003 and that her son Suleman fell ill and died during that time. It is known that terrorism suspects often spend a period of time in the country before being turned over to the Americans. According to the Asian Human Rights Commission, there are 52 secret prisons in the country, into which thousands of Pakistanis are believed to have disappeared since the beginning of the war on terrorism.A number of other prisoners held at Bagram Air Base, the site of the most important US detainee camp in Afghanistan, say they heard a woman screaming. Some claim two women were there. The woman was nicknamed the "gray lady of Bagram."Elaine Whitfield Sharp, an attorney who has represented the family since 2003, is convinced that Siddiqui was classified as a high-level prisoner and spent five years in a so-called "black site" in Bagram -- in one of these notorious black holes in the legal system.
An Excellent Student
But who is Aafia Siddiqui? Her sister, Fauzia Siddiqui, pulls out several photo albums that she hopes will help answer this question. The books are filled with images of garden parties, family gatherings and children's birthdays. Aafia, Fauzia's younger sister by five years, is shown holding various pets, including a hamster, a cat, a goat and a lamb.Fauzia Siddiqui, wearing a scarf wrapped loosely around her head, receives guests on the terrace of her house. The cook brings out food; a fountain bubbles in the background. Surrounded by a high wall, the terrace is an oasis in the middle of Karachi, a city of 12 million.The Siddiquis are a model Pakistani family, modern and devout at the same time. The father was a surgeon, the mother is a housewife, and the family has lived in the British city of Manchester and in Zambia. All three children studied abroad. Mohammed, an architect, lives in Houston and Fauzia, a neurologist, worked at one of the best hospitals in Boston and lived in the same house as her sister for several years.She returned to Karachi some time ago and now works at the city's Aga Khan University. She says she would like to establish an institute to train neurologists. Helping the poor, says Fauzia, is a tradition in her family. Her sister Aafia, she says, also believed in helping the poor and was always there for other people. "My sister is innocent. She could never harm anyone. Something is simply not right," she says. "There must have been a mistake."She picks up her photo albums again, holding onto them like a shipwreck victim clinging to a life preserver. Aafia at the piano. Aafia in a student dormitory, together with four Chinese students. A young woman who likes to pose for the camera and loves colorful silk dresses, but rarely wears a headscarf.Can someone like this be "the most dangerous woman in the world"?In Boston, Siddiqui led a life between two countries and between two worlds. They clashed when, after her 1995 graduation, her parents arranged her marriage. The bride had never seen her husband before the wedding. In fact, they married on the telephone -- long-distance between Boston and Karachi.Her husband, Amjad Khan, was an anesthesiologist. His father owned a pharmaceutical factory and the parents considered him a good catch. When he arrived in Boston, he came without presents or flowers. Instead, he could only complain about how much money the family had spent for a small ceremony, a hotel room, and a white silk dress with many pearls for Aafia, which made her look like a princess. It would have been better to donate the money to charity, he said. Weren't there enough needy people in Pakistan? Siddiqui's husband found a job in a Boston hospital, and the couple had two children, Ahmed and Mariam. They fought frequently, and Khan beat his wife and the children. Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Siddiqui flew to Karachi with her children, only to return to Boston a few months later. After six months the couple left the apartment, gave away the furniture and, on June 26, 2002, moved to Pakistan. When Amjad Khan separated from his wife a few weeks later, she was already pregnant with Suleman. Under Islamic law, divorce at that point was not possible. She earned a PhD in neuroscience and wrote her thesis on learning through imitation. Her sister says Siddiqui had wanted to start a pre-school in Boston, where children would be taught using techniques she had studied. This is the one side of Siddiqui, the smart academic and patient wife. But there is another side -- the devout moralist, the energetic fundraiser. As a young biology student she invited non-Muslims to dinner, touted Islam and gave Koran courses for converts. She met several committed Islamists through the Muslim student group at MIT. One was Suheil Laher, the group's imam, an open advocate of Islamization and jihad before Sept. 11. For a short time, Laher was also the head of the Islamic charity Care International, which had nothing to do with the eponymous aid organization. The group, which was believed to have collected funds for jihadist fighters in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Chechnya, has since been disbanded."Sister Aafia was very committed, highly intelligent and extremely concerned about the fate of Muslims worldwide, and she believed that she could make a difference in the world," says Faaruuq. She often came to the "Mosque for the Praising of Allah," a shabby house of prayer in Roxbury, a working-class neighborhood of Boston. She ordered large numbers of English-language Korans and religious literature, stored the boxes at the mosque and later handed out the books in prisons. What exactly happened in those few seconds before she was shot is important, because the indictment brought by the district attorney in New York describes a version of the events that differs considerably from Siddiqui's story. It alleges that she grabbed a US soldier's M4 assault rifle, released the safety catch and fired several shots, but without hitting anyone, all within seconds. One of the soldiers, acting in self-defense, allegedly shot her.A person would have to be familiar with the M4 to know how to release its safety catch. And would a US soldier put down his weapon when a wanted al-Qaida terrorist was sitting in the same room? A psychological assessment of Siddiqui has lain before the judge in New York since early November. The report says she is not competent to stand trial. If the case does go to trial, and if the court takes on the military's version of the indictment, it will not include any mention of Siddiqui's alleged terrorist connections, there would be no need to prove any of the alleged terrorist acts.And then the question of why Aafia Siddiqui, a gifted scientist, was once considered the most dangerous woman in the world, would remain a mystery forever.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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