Aafia Siddiqui (born 2 March 1972) was a Pakistani neuroscientist who was a courier and financier for al-Qaeda; she was the wife of Ammar al-Baluchi, an al-Qaeda leader.
Biography[]
Aafia Siddiqui was born on 2 March 1972 in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan to a Sunni Muslim family of Sindhis; she attended school in Zambia until the age of eight before returning to Pakistan. In 1990, she went to the United States on a student visa and settled in Massachusetts, and she gained a degree in neuroscience from the University of Massachusetts. She distributed pamphlets for the Muslim Students' Association and joined the al-Qaeda-linked al-Kifah Refugee Center, being drawn into terrorism.
Siddiqui criticized the Pakistani government for asking for US help in fighting extremism, and she later said that she hoped that America would become a Muslim land. In January 2003, she owned a postal box for al-Qaeda member Majid Khan, and in 2004 she was charged with buying $19,000,000 worth of blood diamonds from Liberia to fund al-Qaeda in their 9/11 attack in September 2001. On 17 July 2008, she was captured in Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, and as she did not speak Dari or Pashto, she was easily identified as suspicious by police and arrested.
She attempted to escape from prison during an interview by stealing an interviewer's M4 Carbine while unrestrained, and she threatened the American soldiers in English. She was shot after the soldiers believed that she was a suicide bomber, and she was recaptured. During her trial, she demanded that no lawyers or jurors were Jewish and wanted them to undergo DNA tests, and in 2010 she was sentenced to 86 years in prison. She was interned with other female special needs people at the Federal Medical Center in Carswell. In January 2022, British Islamist Malik Faisal Akram took hostages at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, near where Siddiqui was incarcerated, and demanded her release in exchange for the release of the hostages. However, the hostages managed to escape during the siege, and Akram was killed; Siddiqui remained in prison.