Court tries to intimidate supporters of Pakistani hero

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s trial for alleged attempted murder of FBI agents and U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan entered its second week Jan. 25 in New York City. Court officials forced all who wanted to attend the trial to twice go through metal detectors and submit to thorough searches, give photo IDs and sign their name. This intimidating process targeting noncitizens from the Pakistani community is being challenged.

Dr. Siddiqui is a 37-year-old Pakistani woman educated in neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her supporters say she was illegally kidnapped with her three young children in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2003 and taken into U.S. custody in Afghanistan, where she was held in secret detention and tortured for five years.

She has much official support in Pakistan. The Pakistani Parliament passed an overwhelming resolution supporting her and has forced the government to pay for her legal defense in U.S. courts.

A witness for the prosecution Jan. 25 who was a medic in Ghazni, Afghanistan, in 2008, testified that she was in a police station where a woman prisoner was being held. The witness said she briefly saw a woman with a weapon, heard gunfire and that bullets hit the wall near her. She said the woman was the only person wounded at that time.

There was some question of whether the U.S. troop whose weapon allegedly wound up in the hands of the diminutive Pakistani woman was a sergeant or a captain.

The trial is proceeding in Courtroom 21B at 500 Pearl St. in downtown Manhattan starting at 9 a.m. daily. For more information, see iacenter.org or call 212-633-6646.