AAFIA MOVEMENT

Shocking Secret Recording Confirms Dr. Aafia Kidnapping in 2003

SPECIAL REPORT on COUNTERPUNCH.org

A New Turn as Lawyers Release Explosive, Secretly Recorded Tape

The Siddiqui Case

By VICTORIA BRITTAIN

… Now new evidence of the kidnapping of Dr Siddiqui prises open part of one of the most shocking of the myriad individual stories of injustice in the war on terror. It also underlines the recklessness and perfidy of a key United States’ partner in the war on terror, which carries its own threat of explosion.

Dr Siddiqui was sentenced in a New York court last year to 86 years for attempted murder of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Her mysterious five-year disappearance before that, her reappearance in Afghanistan in 2008, her subsequent trial in the US, and the confusion surrounding all these events, have made Dr Siddiqui’s a symbolic case in much of the Muslim world. Now a senior law enforcement officer has claimed to have been involved personally on the day she was seized, with her three children, by Pakistani police agents in Karachi in March 2003 and handed over to the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI. …

…..The new evidence, on a secretly recorded audio tape, is a potential earthquake in the chronically unstable political situation in Pakistan, where rage against the US runs deep and wide, especially as civilian casualties mount with the use of drone aircraft. Already the case of Aafia Siddiqui has periodically brought tens of thousands of people out on the streets in the last two and a half years in protest at what has been done to her by the United States’ military and legal systems since she reemerged….

…A full report, and the four hour tape, in Urdu, Punjabi and English, is being released by the International Justice Network in the United States at 6am EDT Monday, and can be  accessed here and,  here with the permission of the witness. Portions of the tape concerning Dr Siddiqui were made available to this reporter  and were independently translated for this article. As of midnight Sunday, EDT, this excerpt can be listened to here…

The full article can be seen here: http://www.counterpunch.org/brittain02142011.html