Aafia Siddiqui held by Pakistani intelligence, her lawyers claim

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

Lawyers for Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman jailed for 86 years by a US court last year, have released an audiotape that purports to explain her mystery disappearance almost eight years ago.

On the tape a man identified as Imran Shaukat, a senior Pakistani counter-terrorism official, says that Siddiqui was picked up by Pakistan's police in March 2003 and handed to the county's intelligence service, ISI. "I caught her," he says.

The Pakistani government has always denied holding Siddiqui, a US-educated mother of three who disappeared between 2003 and 2008 and whose case has become a powerful symbol of anti-American sentiment in Pakistan.

The tape, said to have been secretly recorded last year, seems to confirm that she and her three children were first detained by police in March 2003 as they travelled to Islamabad.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/14/aafia-siddiqui-audiotape-pakistan-lawyers

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Robb]

2. Earlier her lawyers said she'd been in Bagram being tortured by the U.S.

...of course, they had no proof but the word of an AQ operative who used the notion to claim Americans were abducting planeloads of Muslim women for sex camps. And http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/164310">Wikileaks rather put the Bagram tale to bed.

I suggest we wait; 85 years left on her sentence, perhaps she can pen a memoir.