Aafia Siddiqui – MIT Trained Scientist With Accused al Qaeda Ties,In Custody – ‘Wanted To Kill Americans’

Aafia Siddiqui

Aafia Siddiqui is in custody.

Five years after her disappearance, an MIT-trained Pakistani neuroscientist accused of belonging to an Al Qaeda cell based in Boston, is alive and in custody in Afghanistan, her family’s attorney said yesterday.

“It has been confirmed by the FBI that Aafia Siddiqui is alive,” said Elaine Whitfield Sharp, a lawyer for Siddiqui’s family, who said she spoke to an FBI official on Thursday. “She is injured but alive, and she is in Afghanistan.”

The news sheds some light on one of the most intriguing local mysteries in the war on terrorism.

Siddiqui, 36, was stopped by police on July 17 outside a government building in central Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, according to a criminal complaint. Police searched her handbag and discovered documents containing recipes for explosives and chemical weapons and describing “various landmarks in the United States, including New York City,” according to the complaint, which did not identify the landmarks.

Police also found maps of Ghazni on her, including the provincial governor’s compounds and the mosques he prayed in, said governor spokesman Sayed Ismail Jahangir.

Siddiqui also was carrying “chemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars,” the complaint said. It did not elaborate. Jahangir said she was carrying “liquid poison.”

Siddiqui, who lived in Roxbury and studied at Brandeis University as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, disappeared with her three children while visiting her parents’ home in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2003, around the same time the FBI announced that it wanted to question her.

For five years, US and Pakistani authorities have denied knowing her whereabouts. But human rights groups and Siddiqui’s relatives have long suspected that she had been captured in Karachi and secretly taken into custody.

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