UNITED STATES: Dr Aafia Siddiqui who disappeared in 2003 from Karachi and five years later showed up as a detainee in Afghanistan’s Ghazni has finally spoken her first words after 20 years in the United States’s captivity, including 13 years in a Texas jail.
Dr Fawzia Siddiqui (Aafia’s sister), Senator Mushtaq Ahmed of the Jamaat-e-Islami, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith met the 42-year-old Aafia for the second time in two days after getting a US visa and permission.
JI Senator Mushtaq took to Twitter and explained the meeting with the high-profile inmate, which lasted for three hours.
The senator said Dr Aafia donned an off-white scarf, khaki dress, white joggers and spoke via phone, and the conversation was fully recorded. Mushtaq claimed that due to her head injury, she had difficulty in hearing, and kept on saying, “Take me out of this hell.”
He said that at the end of the meeting, Aafia was taken away in chains. Aafia talks on Mirza Ghalib, Allama Iqbal & philosophy. The senator said that in order to keep her sister busy, Dr Fawzia talked about books, literature, and poetry.
Quoting Aafia, he said she showed extraordinary ability to speak on philosophical and scientific discussions and on Mirza Ghalib, Allama Iqbal and Hafeez Jalandhari.
The senator said, “But suddenly she talked about her children, mother, and the torture of the prison and the terrible future of the prison and commented ‘take me out of this hell’.”
He appealed to the rulers to release the oppressed Aafia, and claimed ‘the key to release of Dr Aafia lies not in Washington, but in Islamabad’.
Dr Aafia completing her sentence in which jail?
Aafia Siddiqui has been completing her 86-year imprisonment in the FMC Carswell Jail in northern Texas, which is an administrative security federal medical center with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp.
It is pertinent to note that there are total 1,068 inmates in FMC Carswell Jail, including 866 at the FMC and 202 inmates at the camp.
