Terror Suspect Could Be Forced to Manhattan Hearing

Siddiqui

A U.S.-trained Pakistani scientist accused of helping al-Qaida and shooting at FBI agents may be forced to appear in court Monday against her will.

Aafia Siddiqui may have to appear by video or in person in federal court in Manhattan at a hearing to decide if she’s competent to stand trial, defense attorney Dawn Cardi said. Siddiqui has reported seeing her children in her jail cell and has stated she died after being strip-searched.

Prosecutors accuse Siddiqui of having ties to al-Qaida and say she grabbed a U.S. Army officer’s M-4 rifle in Afghanistan, pointed it at an Army captain and cried “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great.” They say she fired at U.S. soldiers and FBI agents before she was shot and wounded by an Army officer.

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Siddiqui, a specialist in neuroscience who trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, appeared in court twice after she was brought to the U.S. last August but has refused to attend proceedings since then. She’s charged with attempted murder and assault.

U.S. District Judge Richard Berman entered a not guilty plea for her.

The judge signed an order days ago permitting authorities to take her to court against her will, Cardi said.

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Al-Qaeda Targeted Lethal Disease Research Facility on Plum Island

Until her arrest in Afghanistan this summer, Aafia Siddiqui was the FBI’s most wanted woman in the world. Now the U.S.-educated, Pakistani mother of three is being held in New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center facing attempted murder charges.

Aafia Siddiqui holds biology and neuroscience degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and Brandeis University. In 2003, she vanished from Pakistan and reappeared on July 17, 2008, outside the governor’s compound in Ghazni, Afghanistan. According to the FBI indictment against her, Siddiqui was carrying “various documents, various chemicals, and a computer thumb drive.”

Aafia Siddiqui is believed to be an al-Qaeda operative. Among the documents in her possession were handwritten notes referring to a “mass-casualty attack” listing locations commonly known to be targets: Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building. But one target, Plum Island, remains virtually unknown to the American public. If Siddiqui really is an al-Qaeda operative, the consideration that this government facility (officially known as the Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center) is a target is unnerving.

Located approximately eight miles off the coast of Connecticut, the 840-acre research facility is home to the most virulent zoonotic diseases in the world. The lethal diseases stored and studied on Plum Island are transmitted to humans by animals. The only U.S. strains of foot-and-mouth disease (eradicated from American soil in 1929) are secured in freezers on Plum Island, as are strains of polio, hog cholera, and African Swine Fever. None of the animals on the island ever leave; those that come uninvited, like deer that sometimes swim there from the mainland, are shot.

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