Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar has said that there has been no success yet in the release of controversial Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, who has been imprisoned in a US prison for more than a decade. He said that Islamabad is trying to convince the US administration to release Aafia.
The Express Tribune reported this in a report on Tuesday (October 29).
It said that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has written a letter to US President Joe Biden seeking the humanitarian release of Aafia. A three-member committee has been formed to closely communicate with US lawmakers to lobby for her pardon, release and return to Pakistan. But these initiatives have not yielded any success yet.
The Pakistani foreign minister made these statements while addressing the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) International Conference on Tuesday.
Early last year, her sister, Fauzia Siddiqui, was able to visit Aafia in a prison hospital in Texas after 20 years. After returning to Pakistan, Fauzia said she was allowed to visit her for four hours “from a distance.” At that time, Dr. Aafia’s physical condition did not seem good to her.
Who is this Aafia Siddiqui?
Dr. Aafia went to the United States at the age of 18 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where her brother lived. She later earned a PhD in neuroscience from Brandeis University. But after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, she came under FBI surveillance for allegedly donating to Islamic organizations.
Dr. Aafia was sentenced to 86 years in prison by a federal district court in New York in September 2008 on charges of attempted murder and assault. She is the first woman the United States has accused of being associated with al-Qaeda but has not been “convicted.”
The United States claims that Dr. Aafia joined al-Qaeda and returned to Pakistan to marry into the family of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the main masters of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Dr. Aafia disappeared in Karachi in 2003 with her three children. Five years later, she was arrested by local forces in Ghazni province, Afghanistan.
