Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s lawyer Clive Stafford Smith tells story of his meeting with her client

TEXAS/KARACHI, August 08 (SABAH): The lawyer of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, Clive Stafford Smith met her client in the US prison and found her in a depressive mood.

He said: “I just came from seeing Aafia for three hours, and will see her for another three hours tomorrow”.

“The prison staff were unusually hostile today. They had already refused my request for Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui to come to visit for a second time in 20 years, and had refused to extend the same courtesy to Senator Talha, a minister in the government of Pakistan, who had planned to travel with her. “The prison has refused my request to allow two Muslim doctors in to conduct an independent medical evaluation of her.

“Aafia was dressed in what can only be described as a ‘Guantánamo Orange’ jumpsuit, with a white headscarf. She is already in the Administrative Segregation unit, which is reserved for the harshest treatment of anyone in the US female prison population – just 25 out of a total of 10,250’’. However, she is on extended detention status, denied commissary, phone calls and even the Q-tip she needed to help with her loss of hearing in his left ear.

“Despite all this, she and I had a very pleasant, constructive meeting. We spent most of the time discussing the various sexual assaults and other abuses to which she has been subjected over the past 15 years. While it is difficult for her to talk about, she understands the need to do so if we are to for changes’’.

“With each description she gave me, she concluded by saying that – while the individual involved did not apologies to her – she had forgiven them, as she had been visited in a dream and told she should. “She described to me how she had been told by US agents that her oldest children, then only very young, had been killed in an earthquake. She only learned that this was not true some years later when she was able to speak with her sister Fowzia,” he said.

“What about my baby?” she asked at the time, without answer. She thinks her youngest – the infant Suleiman – was killed by her original abductors, though she has not been given confirmation of this. However, in one of the sessions when she was being tortured in Bagram Air Force base the US agents jeered at her, and laughed saying Suleiman had been killed. “I get very little done here,” she said. “I pray continually. If I stop praying for five minutes I find myself in the deepest trouble.”

She asked me to deliver her love to her living children, to her sister, and to her family and supporters. “I have hope that God will unite us soon,” she concluded.

Clive Stafford Smith said if you need something from me – “The prison is being utterly unreasonable, so it looks like we’ll just have to sue them to get Aafia her rights. In the meantime, though she is existing in a hell-on-earth, Aafia continues to exhibit great courage and resilience.”