Aafia Siddiqui (also spelled Afiya; ; born 2 March 1972) is a Pakistani national who is serving an 86-year sentence at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, United States for attempted murder and other felonies.
Siddiqui was born in Pakistan to a Sunni Muslim family.
1990
For a period from 1990, she studied in the United States and obtained a B.S. in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University in 2001.
Siddiqui moved to Houston, Texas, US on a student visa in 1990, joining her brother who was studying architecture.
She attended the University of Houston where friends and family described her interests as limited to religion and schoolwork.
She avoided movies, novels and television, except for the news.
After three semesters, she transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
1992
In 1992, as a sophomore, Siddiqui won a $5,000 Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal "Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women".
She returned to Pakistan to interview architects of the Islamization and the Hudood Laws, including Taqi Usmani, the spiritual adviser to her family.
As a junior, she received a $1,200 City Days fellowship through MIT's program to help clean up Cambridge elementary school playgrounds.
1995
While she initially had a triple major in biology, anthropology, and archaeology at MIT, she graduated in 1995 with a BS in biology.
At MIT, Siddiqui lived in the all-female McCormick Hall.
She remained active in charity work and proselytising.
Her fellow MIT students described her as being religious, which was not unusual at the time, but not a fundamentalist, one of them saying that she was "just nice and soft-spoken."
She joined the Muslim Students' Association, and a fellow Pakistani recalls her recruiting for association meetings and distributing pamphlets.
Siddiqui began doing volunteer work for the Al Kifah Refugee Center after returning from Pakistan.
2003
She returned to Pakistan for a time following the 9/11 attacks and again in 2003 during the war in Afghanistan.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad named her a courier and financier for al-Qaeda, and she was placed on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations's Seeking Information – Terrorism list; she remains the only woman to have been featured on the list.
Around this time, she and her three children were allegedly kidnapped in Pakistan.
Five years later, she reappeared in Ghazni, Afghanistan, and was arrested by Afghan police and held for questioning by the FBI.
While in custody, Siddiqui allegedly told the FBI she had gone into hiding but later disavowed her testimony and stated she had been abducted and imprisoned.
Supporters believe she was held captive at Bagram Air Force Base as a ghost detainee, an allegation the U.S. government denies.
During the second day in custody, she allegedly shot at visiting U.S. FBI and Army personnel with an M4 carbine one of the interrogators had placed on the floor by his feet.
She was shot in the torso when a warrant officer returned fire.
2008
She was hospitalized, treated and then extradited to the US, where in September 2008 she was indicted on charges of assault and attempted murder of a US soldier in the police station in Ghazni, charges she denied.
2010
She was convicted on 3 February 2010 and later sentenced to 86 years in prison.
Her case has been called a "flashpoint of Pakistani-American tensions", and "one of the most mysterious in a secret war dense with mysteries".
In Pakistan, her arrest and conviction was seen by the public as an "attack on Islam and Muslims", and occasioned large protests throughout the country; while in the US, she was considered by some to be especially dangerous as "one of the few alleged Al Qaeda associates with the ability to move about the United States undetected, and the scientific expertise to carry out a sophisticated attack".
She has been termed "Lady al-Qaeda" by a number of media organizations due to her alleged affiliation with Islamists.
Islamic State have offered to trade her for prisoners on two occasions: once for James Foley and once for Kayla Mueller.
Pakistani news media called the trial a "farce", while other Pakistanis labeled this reaction "knee-jerk Pakistani nationalism".
The Pakistani Prime Minister at that time, Yusuf Raza Gilani, and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, promised to push for her release.
Aafia Siddiqui was born in Karachi, Pakistan, to Muhammad Salay Siddiqui, a British-trained neurosurgeon, and Ismet (née Faroochi), an Islamic teacher, social worker and charity volunteer.
She belongs to the Urdu-speaking Muhajir, Deobandi community of Karachi.
She was raised in an observant Muslim household, although her parents combined devotional Islam with their resolve to understand and use technological advances in science.
Ismet Siddiqui was prominent in political and religious circles, teaching classes on Islam wherever she lived, founding a United Islamic Organization, and serving as a member of Pakistan's parliament.
Her support for strict Islam in the face of feminist opposition to his Hudood Ordinances drew the attention of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq who appointed her to a Zakat Council.
Siddiqui is the youngest of three siblings.
Her brother, Muhammad, studied to become an architect in Houston, Texas, while her sister, Fowzia, is a Harvard-trained neurologist who worked at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore and taught at Johns Hopkins University before she returned to Pakistan.
Aafia attended school in Zambia until the age of eight and finished her primary and secondary schooling in Karachi.
