Dr Aafia Siddiqui

Asalamualykum

Dr Aafia Siddiqui is an MIT Phd, Pakistani neuroscientist, with research papers on the then up & coming internet, and social science subjects. She disappeared from Karachi in March 2003 along with her 3 underage children, one child only a few months old. She officially re-surfaced, after many US denials, in 2008 in American custody. This was after award winning British journalist, Yvonne Ridley led a campaign for the ‘grey lady of Bagram’ ( Internment Facility in Afghanistan used by the US Army - the Guantanamo of the East ), or ‘prisoner 650′. Two of her children are still missing. She and her children (all below 18) were held in Bagram Air base without trial. She was said to have kept prisoners awake”with her haunting sobs and piercing screams”. In 2005 male prisoners were so agitated by her plight, that they went on hunger strike for six days. She was convicted in early 2010 in New York for attempted murder of 2 US guards, an offence she allegedly committed in Bagram during interrogation (apparently trying to escape), in which only she seems to have been injured by gunshot - nobody else. Why was she kidnapped in the first place without legal due process, and how guilty can she be, even if true, for trying to escape from her captors that offered her no legal due process? Dr Aafia’s mental state & stability after her treatment at Bagram, losing her children (two of whom are US citizens) and being shot by the US guards has been questioned..



Dr-Aafia-Siddiqui
Dr Aafia, being a woman, a university lecturer, and scholar from the prestigious MIT is one high profile example of many Pakistani citizens who have simply disappeared or been kidnapped since 2001. These missing persons are either held in illegal detention facilities inside Pakistan or rendered across borders, mainly to Afghanistan, all at the behest of the American occupation authorities there, without any due legal processes, and in many cases with the complicity of the supposedly sovereign government of Pakistan. Regardless of the soundness of one case, there has been many suspicious disappearances in Pakistan in the so called ‘war on terror’ and we seek to address these by demanding the Pakistani government investigate, respond to the demands of the people, and that the world pay heed to an increasingly volatile situation exacerbated by such disappearances, legal anomalies, abuses of rights, and violations of sovereignty by the US and it’s allies internally or externally.



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