Aafia Siddiqui and WikiLeaks

Diehard supporters of Aafia Siddiqui have maintained her innocence from when she was arrested in Ghazi in 2008, where she was caught in possession of chemicals, through to her trial in New York City in 2010, where she was handed down an 86-year sentence for shooting at her US interrogators. However, the latest revelations from WikiLeaks show that she was part of an al Qaeda cabal plotting to smuggle explosives into the US, and that she volunteered to manufacture biological weapons. This is unlikely to dampen the ardour of her vociferous supporters, but for the rest of us it should now be abundantly clear that Aafia was deeply tied to al Qaeda.

Much of the information in the WikiLeaks files concerning Aafia comes from testimony from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded nearly 200 times in Guantanamo Bay. It is possible that he may have agreed with everything his interrogators demanded of him because of the torture methods employed. Still, the coincidences are far too damning to buy the story that Aafia was trapped in a web of US conspiracies. According to the cables, Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar Baluchi, who was allegedly married to Aafia, was the person who asked Aafia to work on manufacturing biological weapons. The file of Guantanamo detainee Saifullah Paracha, another cause celebre in Pakistan, says that Aafia opened a PO box in the US as part of a plan to smuggle explosives into the US. That Paracha’s son was in possession of the key to that box is again damning for Aafia.

This is not to say that the US has handled Aafia’s case according to international norms. Her whereabouts since her disappearance from Karachi in 2003 till she was arrested in 2008 in Afghanistan remain a mystery and she may well have been illegally detained by either the US or Pakistan. She has also never been charged with or tried for terrorism in a court. In the court of public opinion, however, she should now be considered guilty.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 28^th, 2011.