The FBI's mysterious case against Dr Aafia Siddiqui

The website of America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is brimming with advice and useful information should you need help. There’s even a bright red button to press if you want to report a crime. I pressed it and reported the crime of perjury involving the complex case of US Prisoner Dr Aafia Siddiqui who is currently serving 86 years in a Texas prison for attempting to kill US soldiers. She didn’t do anything of the sort. Yes, there was a shooting incident in Ghazni Province’s National Police station in Afghanistan, but it was the soldiers who nearly killed her.

I have been investigating the mysterious case of Dr Aafia since March 2003. Dr Asim Qureshi from UK-based advocacy group Cage told me about the mother of three during a TV interview. Along with her children, all aged under five at the time, she was snatched in a joint US and Pakistan intelligence operation in Karachi. Most mums would not even think about going to the corner shop with three such young children if they could avoid it, but US intelligence wants us to believe that Aafia headed off on a jihad with three tots in tow.

Dr Aafia is the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice

I can tell you with 100 per cent confidence, having examined all of the facts exhaustively, that Dr Aafia is the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice; some might even call it one of the most extreme cases of domestic violence. My views are shared with her lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who has a formidable record of winning freedom for detainees at the notorious US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay.

During the past 20 years, some very powerful senior figures in America, Pakistan and elsewhere have lied to and deceived the US authorities to ensure that the rather brilliant academic Dr Aafia Siddiqui remains behind bars. In 2023, her sister described her as looking like a “living corpse”.

It would take me weeks to go into the minute details of the case which is currently sitting on US President Joe Biden’s desk in the hope of a Presidential Pardon. Well, if “Genocide Joe” is so shameless that he can pardon his own son of serious crime, then he should be able to find it in his heart to do the right thing by Aafia. Sadly, the Biden administration has a shockingly poor record when it comes to doing the right thing so, personally, I’m not holding my breath waiting for a pardon to come out of the Oval Office.

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What triggered my latest moves in Aafia’s case was a secret document signed by an FBI Agent called Mehtab Syed, who obviously thought that her rambling account of the crime that led to Aafia’s arrest would never be scrutinised very seriously. Agent Syed is a bit of a celebrity in the FBI as the first Pakistan-born woman to become a special agent. Three years ago the FBI Asian poster girl was used to mark Women’s History Month in a short interview about how and why she joined the FBI.

In April 2023, the FBI proudly announced her promotion from section chief in the Counterintelligence Division at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC to take charge of the Counterintelligence and Cyber Division at the Los Angeles Field Office. Thus, like Aafia Siddiqui, Agent Syed is a bit of a trailblazer in her field, and while I’ve no doubt she has worked doubly hard as a person of colour in a racist country like the US, I have to wonder what on earth encouraged her to give misleading evidence to incriminate the mother of three.

An incredulous story unfolds which has more holes than a Swiss cheese

Any sense of the sisterhood appears to be rather absent in the ranks of the FBI; this is obvious when you read the secret document she signed off on 31 July 2008 as a Special Agent with the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), because it’s there that an incredulous story unfolds which has more holes than a Swiss cheese. The FBI made the schoolboy howler initially of reading “Dr Aafia, neuroscientist”, as “Dr Aafia, nuclear scientist”. The bureau’s investigation has been out of control ever since. How could such a simple mistake be made by one of the world’s top intelligence agencies?

In her secret evidence, Agent Syed wrote that Dr Aafia first came to the attention of Afghan Police in July 2008 as she was acting suspiciously. She wrote that the police “searched her handbag and found numerous documents describing the creation of explosives, chemical weapons, and other weapons involving biological material and radiological agents. SIDDIQUI’s papers included descriptions of various landmarks in the United States, including in New York City. In addition, among SIDDIQUI’s personal effects were documents detailing United States military assets, excerpts from the Anarchist’s Arsenal, and a one gigabyte (1gb) digital media storage device (thumb drive). d. SIDDIQUI was also in possession of numerous chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.”

I have asked to see the handbag said to contain all of these items but… surprise, surprise, it has gone missing, along with the US Army M-4 rifle that Aafia is said to have wrested from a US Army Warrant Officer before removing the safety catch and firing off two rounds. The two spent bullets, dug out of the wall of the prison cell where this is all supposed to have taken place, are also missing.

No fingerprints were found on either the gun or any of the sealed bottles and glass jars that Syed alleges Aafia carried in her amazing, voluminous handbag. Many crucial pieces of evidence disappeared before her trial and none of the “CSI-style” evidence like gunshot residue, fingerprints, matching partial palm prints, hair, sweat or DNA was found to connect Aafia with the rifle or any other pieces of evidence.

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It is the bag that I am most interested in, though, and I’m surprised that no female juror asked to examine it when she appeared in court. I would have. It reminded me of the bag used by the fictitious Harry Potter heroine Hermione Granger, whose small handbag was able to hold many objects including, if memory serves me right, a large tent. I think even that bag would have been hard-pushed to hold everything that Special Agent Syed claimed was in Aafia’s bag in her report: photographs of the New York skyline and other major landmarks in US cities; glass jars containing chemical pastes; sealed bottles containing chemical liquids; numerous A-4 documents and files describing how to make explosives; chemical weapons; more weapons involving biological material and radiological agents; more documents detailing United States military assets; a one gigabyte thumb drive; and The Anarchist Arsenal containing bomb-making recipes.

That’s one hell of a lot of kit to keep in an average-sized handbag

To my disappointment there was no partridge in a pear tree or cuddly toy, but there were, said Special Agent Syed, detailed handwritten notes and more photographs that referred to a “mass casualty attack” and listed various locations in the United States, including Plum Island, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s one hell of a lot of kit to keep in an average-sized handbag. I’m assuming The Anarchist Arsenal is the 96-page paperback version; the FBI’s Wonder Woman didn’t go into such specific detail.

As any woman would tell you, you cannot move about very easily with enough items to fill a Special Forces backpack, never mind a woman’s handbag. And why, if you’re off on an undercover mission to wreak havoc in Afghanistan, would you need a large photograph of the Statue of Liberty or other US tourist sites?

Basically, the FBI blundered when they snatched Aafia and her three children off the streets of Karachi on 31 March 2003. Having swallowed some false information about the former MIT student, they failed to check the facts.

In most of the major blunders in US President George W Bush’s Global War on Terror, both the CIA and the FBI tried to hide their wronged victims by carting them off to grey sites, torture dungeons and, in Aafia’s case, Bagram Prison. It was there that she was gang-raped by US soldiers.

From what I have been able to discover, Aafia was deliberately set up by someone who hated her so much that he or she wanted her gone forever. Her estranged-husband, the boss of a major pharmaceutical company in Pakistan, is the favourite as far as his critics are concerned, but I find it hard to believe that someone could take such revenge on the mother of his three children. I’ve yet to interview him, but if he’s reading this, I urge him to get in touch.

Ever since her forced disappearance, Aafia’s case has been used and abused by Pakistan’s politicians who’ve promised voters they will return the “daughter of the nation.” I was disgusted to learn, though, that they have never even made an official request to successive US administrations to have her repatriated.

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The sad reality is that Aafia Siddiqui should have been a free woman back in 2014 after I negotiated her release with two members of the then outlawed Taliban Shura (Consultative Committee) in exchange for US soldier Beaudry Robert “Bowe” Bergdahl who was held captive from 2009 to 2014 by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bergdahl was captured after leaving his post on 30 June, 2009.

Sgt Bergdahl was freed by the Taliban in March 2015 in a controversial exchange for five Taliban officials being held at Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner swap came after secret talks between the US government and the Taliban, brokered by Qatar. The exchanged prisoners were Mohammad Fazl, Khirullah Khairkhwa, Abdul Haq Wasiq, Mullah Norullah Noori and Mohammad Nabi Omari, the most senior Afghans held at Guantanamo. They were captured during the US war in their country in 2001.

It was Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which sabotaged our one-to-one deal to free the “Daughter of the Nation”. To this day I still can’t think of a good enough reason for the ISI to block the deal, but it did, the Taliban told me.

What I can tell you is that since Aafia disappeared in 2003, she has been wrongly accused of being part of Al Qaida; and wrongly accused of marrying Ammar Al-Baluchi, an alleged Al-Qaida member and a nephew of Al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Karachi. He’s the so-called mastermind of 9/11. The bogus marriage story isn’t feasible because Aafia’s post-divorce waiting period required by Islam (Iddah) hadn’t yet ended when Baluchi was arrested. That particular fake story was planted by the ISI with journalists to further discredit her.

Clive Stafford-Smith has been working tirelessly round the clock in Washington this last week trying to brief, lobby and enlighten US senators and congress about Aafia. There is still some hope that a Presidential Pardon will be granted. If ever anyone deserved justice, it is Dr Aafia Siddiqui. In the meantime, UK advocacy group Cage continues to fight her case along with her lawyer. If you would like to offer her some words of support, the prison will allow you to send her an email with a message of support.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.