| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Activist turned extremist, US says |
| 2008-08-12 |
| Extremist, which is Boston Globese for "terrorist"... WASHINGTON - She was a tiny woman with big convictions. While her fellow students at MIT read newspaper articles about the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia in the 1990s, Aafia Siddiqui sprang to action, giving slide shows and rousing speeches to collect donations for their cause. While other women from traditional Pakistani families stayed home after marriage, Siddiqui juggled the demands of motherhood, a doctoral dissertation at Brandeis, and a Roxbury-based nonprofit organization she established to spread Islamic teachings. But yesterday, federal prosecutors in New York alleged that Siddiqui's activism had become extremism. US officials say that the 36-year-old mother of three became an Al Qaeda operative who ended up in Afghanistan and attacked US soldiers who had come to interrogate her. "She is a high security risk," said Christopher Lloyd LaVigne, assistant US attorney, told a judge at a hearing yesterday. Now, those who knew Siddiqui in Boston are struggling to understand how the MIT graduate and trained neuroscientist could pose "a clear and present danger to America," as the FBI alleges. "Something went awry," said Abdullah Faaruuq, imam of Roxbury's Mosque for the Praising of Allah, to which Siddiqui donated Korans and other books. Speculating that she may have been mistreated, Faaruuq said: "She was not at that mindset when I knew her. I don't what could have led to that." Intelligence officials believe that Siddiqui, considered the world's most-wanted female before her arrest, became affiliated with Al Qaeda while in Boston. Though the FBI had sought her in 2003, she returned to her native Pakistan with her children and went underground before agents found her, according to interviews with US officials and documents from the FBI and the director of national intelligence. US officials say she eluded them until last month when she was arrested with an unidentified teenage boy in Ghazni, Afghanistan. Local police caught the two outside the provincial governor's compound with chemicals, maps, and documents on explosives, according to court papers. "They were here for suicide bombing," an Afghan official in Ghazni told the Globe in a telephone interview last week. "Both of them were looking like they were prepared for suicide." Siddiqui is also accused of shooting at US officials who had come to interrogate her. She allegedly grabbed an M-4 rifle and opened fire; she was wounded when a soldier returned fire. Last week, FBI officials brought her to New York for trial in the attempted shooting. The teenage boy, who relatives fear might be Siddiqui's son, remains in Afghan custody, according to the Afghan official. Siddiqui appeared in court in a wheelchair yesterday. A judge ordered her held without bail, but granted her access to immediate medical care. Her attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, said Siddiqui is innocent, swept up in the war on terrorism. Sharp also accused the US government of secretly holding her client for years. "She doesn't know how many years, but it was the same location, and her captors were Americans, and the treatment was horrendous," Sharp said in a telephone interview Friday after a three-hour meeting with Siddiqui in a New York detention center. Sharp would not say how Siddiqui turned up in Afghanistan, saying, "Long story, can't tell you that." Drinking again, Elaine? The mystery of Siddiqui's whereabouts for the last five years adds yet another twist to the bizarre tale of her transformation from an MIT student activist to international terrorism suspect awaiting trial in Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center. Born to an educated, religious family in Karachi, Siddiqui spent years volunteering with the United Islamic Organization, a charity run by her mother, according to fund-raising e-mails she sent to friends in 1995 which The Boston Globe has obtained. She moved to the United States as a teenager in 1990, joining her brother, an architect in Houston, and her sister, a neurologist. In 1991, after transferring from the University of Houston, Siddiqui arrived at MIT, wearing Western clothes but covering her hair with a scarf in the Muslim tradition. She quickly honed her activist skills, using the Internet and delivering passionate appeals to raise funds for Islamic causes. In one instance, she organized financial sponsorships for Muslim widows and orphans in Bosnia. "Kindly fill the pledge form and return to Al-Kifah," she directed a group of potential donors in an e-mail. The message appears to refer to the Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, which the Justice Department has accused of diverting charitable funds to militants. She helped establish the Dawa Resource Center, a program that operates out of Faaruuq's mosque, distributing Korans and offering Islam-based advice to prison inmates. Faaruuq's wife, who asked that her name not be used, said that Siddiqui gave powerful speeches at conferences in the Boston area urging women, especially new converts to Islam, to embrace traditional Muslim customs, including wearing the headscarf and declining to shake a man's hand. "She shared with us that we should never make excuses for who we are," said Faaruuq's wife. "She said: 'Americans have no respect for people who are weak. Americans will respect us if we stand up and we are strong.' " Around the time she graduated from MIT in 1995, Siddiqui married Muhammad Khan, an anesthesiologist from Karachi who became a resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. At first, the couple seemed happy, hosting friends for meals in their apartment on St. Alphonsus Street in Roxbury. Shortly after her marriage, Siddiqui gave birth to a son and bore a daughter, Maram Bint Muhammad, in September 1998 at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center. But the arranged marriage soured within a few years when Khan disapproved of his wife's activism, according to a 2005 Vogue Magazine profile titled, "The Most Wanted Woman in the World." In the spring of 2002, months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, FBI agents questioned the couple about their purchase of night-vision goggles, body armor, and military instruction manuals, according to Sharp. The Globe probably thinks they were for bird watching... Months later, the family returned to Pakistan, where Siddiqui and Khan divorced just before the birth of their third child, according to Sharp. Siddiqui then married an Al Qaeda operative known as Ammar al-Baluchi, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to documents from the director of national intelligence. In March 2003, Mohammed was arrested in a predawn raid in Islamabad. He and Baluchi were held for years in secret US detention and are now awaiting trial at Guantanamo Bay. Within weeks of Mohammed's arrest, Siddiqui's photo appeared on the FBI website as a person wanted for questioning. Afraid the FBI would find her in Karachi, Siddiqui told her family she was taking her children to Islamabad to stay with an uncle, but the family never arrived, said Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricketer turned politician."She was petrified because the FBI had put her on a most-wanted list," said Khan, who said that Siddiqui's uncle asked him to help find her. With her whereabouts unknown, sketchy reports in Pakistani papers suggested that she had been arrested in Pakistan and was turned over to the Americans, prompting anti-US protests in Pakistan. Amnesty International listed Siddiqui as possibly among the "ghost prisoners" held in secret by the US government. Her anguished mother traveled to the United States in search of clues. But yesterday, US officials vehemently denied that Siddiqui had been in American custody until her recent arrest. Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, called the allegations "absolutely baseless and false." A CIA spokesman also denied that she had been detained. "For several years, we have had no information regarding her whereabouts whatsoever," said Gregory Sullivan, a State Department spokesman on South Asian affairs. "It is our belief that she . . . has all this time been concealed from the public view by her own choosing." |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #1 "It is our belief that she . . . has all this time been concealed from the public view by her own choosing." Pretty easy to hide with a burka on. |
| Posted by: tipper 2008-08-12 16:09 |