Aafia Siddiqui

• The 37-year-old Siddiqui, who is also a mother of three, was convicted of attempted murder and assault. A New York jury found her guilty of grabbing a U.S. officer’s rifle while she was being questioned in 2008 in Afghanistan in connection with containers of chemicals and notes referring to mass-casualty attacks that she was allegedly carrying. She used the rifle to fire at FBI agents and military personnel before she was wrestled to the ground. Siddiqui sustained a gunshot wound in the struggle. No one else was injured.
• But there are still no clear answers about her whereabouts in the five years before her detention in Afghanistan. Where was Siddiqui between March 2003 and July 2008? Two of her three children still remain missing. And she has never been tried for her alleged links to Al-Qaeda — the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago.
• Declan Walsh, an Islamabad-based foreign correspondent for the British daily “The Guardian,” tried to resolve these mysteries last year when he traveled across Pakistan to interview officials, Siddiqui’s relatives, and anybody who would talk to try to solve the puzzle.
• Walsh tells RFE/RL that there are two aspects to Aafia Siddiqui’s story. One is the court case in New York, which was strictly focused on the events in a police station in the central Afghan city of Ghazni, where she was interrogated shortly after her arrest in July 2008.
• “But the much wider picture really is what was happening with Aafia Siddiqui for the previous five years,” he says.
• Siddiqui’s name first came to light when she disappeared in March 2003 while traveling to the airport in Karachi, according to her family. Walsh says understanding those five years is the key to unlocking her mystery.
• “There are these conflicting accounts about where she was for that period,” he says. “But the public opinion here in Pakistan is very much with the train of thought that she was in [the U.S. detention center] in Bagram [Afghanistan].
• “And I suppose that this really feeds into the kind of broader anti-Americanism in the country where Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s case has become symbolic of wider public anger about the disappearances of terror suspects, about people who go missing and who never come back again, and about perceived injustices in the American judicial system towards Muslims and particularly towards Pakistanis.”
• This popular account of Siddiqui’s fate is supported by her mother and sister and has shaped perceptions in the Pakistani media. But Walsh says that her former husband, Amjad Khan, whom she divorced in 2002, tells a different story.
• Khan told Walsh that being concerned for his children, he watched Siddiqui discreetly from a distance and that she was in Pakistan between 2003 and 2008. Walsh adds that her uncle, Shams ul-Hassan Farhuqi, also revealed a bizarre episode when Siddiqui  turned up at his house in Islamabad in January 2008 and asked him to send her to the Taliban in Afghanistan because she was “very uncomfortable” about being in the control of an intelligence agency in Pakistan. The uncle claimed Siddiqui told him that the Taliban were “the only people with whom she would feel safe.”
• Walsh says that the issue has turned into a political case and people on all sides are “looking less at the facts of the case and more at what Aafia Siddiqui represents for them.”
• He says that while her family and the Pakistani media are focused on Siddiqui’s fate, there is little discussion of her two missing children. Her elder son, Ahmed, now 13, was arrested along with her in Afghanistan. He was later returned to his aunt but has never spoken about his mother’s intervening disappearance. Her two younger children — daughter Mariam and son Sulaiman — are still missing. Siddiqui’s family, Walsh says, has remained silent about them.
• “There have been accusations and allegations that these children have been taken into orphanages or that they have died in custody,” he says. “But there has been no great examination of this side of the case. And that seems very odd to me. And I think this probably suggests why this case has many layers to it, several of which have not yet come to public light.”