Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui meets Dr. Aafia Siddiqui after 20 years at the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Texas
TEXAS, May 31 (SABAH): On Wednesday, sisters Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui and Dr. Aafia Siddiqui held a reunion after 20 years. It was hardly the meeting they would have liked: the sterile visitation room at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell was divided by glass. They were not allowed a first hug, or even to touch, after two decades.
Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui was forbidden to share the photographs of Dr. Aafia’s son and daughter, both now in their twenties.
The background music for the meeting was the periodic rattle of the heavy prison keys.
Dr. Fowzia was obviously shocked by the state of her younger sister. Dr. Aafia was led in, dressed in a tan prison uniform, and a white headscarf. Her upper teeth missing from one prison assault, she had difficulty hearing due to a beating she had taken around the head. She spent the first hour detailing the daily trauma in her life.
Eventually, her lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who was present to facilitate the meeting, encouraged her to talk to her sister about her loved ones, at least for this afternoon.
“I miss my family every day. My mother, my father, you (my sister), my children, I think of them all the time,” said Dr. Aafia. She and her sister swapped stories for two and a half hours. All of Dr. Aafia’s tales of her children were from 2003, permanently frozen in at the moment she was abducted in Karachi.
Afterwards, while Dr. Fowzia thanked the junior prison officers who treated her with respect. Dr. Fowzia was understandably too upset to comment, beyond quietly weeping in the car as she was driven out of the prison.
The visits over the next two days will focus more on her case, and what can be done to secure her release.
Today (Thursday) at 9.30 AM Dr. Aafia will meet her sister and lawyer again, along with Jamaat-e-Islami Senator Mushtaq Ahmed Khan.
She has a legal visit with her counsel in the afternoon. On Thursday at 9.30 AM she will meet her sister and lawyer again, before another legal visit in the afternoon.
“It was deeply depressing, but nevertheless a privilege, to be present for this emotional reunion,” said Clive Stafford Smith. “But the importance of these visits is, as Dr. Aafia makes very clear, how we can get her home from the hell of her current existence.”
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui — a Pakistani neuroscientist jailed in the United States for over a decade — finally met her younger sister Dr. Fauzia Siddiqui after 20 years, at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Texas, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan shared on Wednesday.
Taking to Twitter, the JI Senator Mushtaq Ahmed Khan shared that another meeting with Dr. Aafia is scheduled for Thursday, in which he and Clive Stafford-Smith — a prominent human rights activist who also helped liberate Abdul Rabbani and Ahmed Rabbani from the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison — will meet with the neurologist.
“Tomorrow I will meet Dr. Aafia in prison along with Dr. Fauzia and Clive Stafford-Smith,” Mushtaq Ahmed Khan tweeted.
In his tweet, Senator Mushtaq shed light on the incarcerated doctor’s plight; however, he said that this has opened up a way for more “discussions and meetings”. He also urged people to raise their voices for Dr. Aafia’s release.
Moreover, Senator Mushtaq recounted the events of the long-delayed meeting, which lasted for two and a half hours and in which the imprisoned doctor narrated her grim circumstances and the tortures she was being subjected to.
“This meeting took place after 20 years and continued for two and a half hours, Dr. Fauzia wasn’t allowed to hug, shake hands with her sister. Dr. Fauzia was not allowed to show Dr. Aafia the pictures of her children. The meeting took place inside a jail room with a thick glass between them. Aafia was in a white scarf and khaki jail dress. ” Senator Mushtaq Ahmed Khan wrote.
He further added: “In the first hour of the two-and-a-half-hour meeting, Dr. Aafia shared the details of the torture she was going through every day. Dr. Aafia said that she misses her mother and children all the time (she does not know about the death of their mother). Dr. Aafia’s front teeth were knocked out/lost due to an attack in prison. She also had difficulty hearing due to a head injury.”
A US-educated Pakistani scientist, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was jailed in 2010 for 86 years by a New York federal district court in September 2008 on charges of attempted murder and assault, stemming from an incident during an interview with the US authorities in Ghazni, Afghanistan — charges that she denied.
She was the first woman to be suspected of Al-Qaeda links by the US, but never convicted of it.
At 18 years old Siddiqui traveled to the US, where her brother lived, to study at Boston’s prestigious MIT, later earning a PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis University.
But after the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001, she came up on the FBI’s radar for donations to Islamic organisations and was linked to the purchase of $10,000 worth of night-vision goggles and books on warfare.
The US suspected she joined Al-Qaeda from America, returning to Pakistan where she married into the family of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed –- an architect of the 9/11 attacks.
She disappeared in around 2003, along with her three children, in Karachi.
Five years later she turned up in Pakistan’s war-torn neighbour Afghanistan, where she was arrested by local forces in the restive southeastern province of Ghazni.