Who's Afraid of Aafia Siddiqui?

The men were ready. They knew the woman who would be joining them for the week was a high-profile Al Qaeda operative. They'd been told she should be treated with the utmost respect. She would arrive in Liberia's bustling capital, Monrovia, on a plane from Quetta, Pakistan. She was to be driven to the safe house, the Hotel Boulevard, where other Al Qaeda figures had stayed, and taken good care of until the deal was done.

The trip from the airport was a hot hour long, and the woman spoke in English to the driver on the way. The driver, who would later become the chief informant in a United Nations-led investigation, described her as a quiet Islamic woman who wore a traditional headscarf and kept mostly to herself. She spent the week holed up in her room, making trips into town for small errands.

About a week after her arrival, the woman left Monrovia as quietly as she had entered, but now she had what she had come for: a large parcel containing gems from Africa's illegal diamond trade. They would be used as a convenient, hard-to-trace way of funding Al Qaeda's global terror operations. It was mid-June 2001, three months before September 11.

The men never saw the woman again in person. But earlier this year, one of them says, he saw two photographs of her. At a news conference in May, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III announced that the FBI was looking for seven people with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. MIT graduate and former Boston resident Aafia Siddiqui was the only woman on the list. After the photos of her appeared on television, the informant picked up the phone and dialed investigators at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which is examining Africa's illegal diamond trade. The informant was convinced that the woman in the photographs was the woman who had come to Liberia.

Now imagine this: The woman in the photographs, Aafia Siddiqui, the same week, mid-June, 2001. She is a 29-year-old mother of two, consumed, like other Boston moms who volunteer or work outside the home, with the minutiae of everyday life. A deeply religious woman, she picks up Korans from a local mosque and distributes them to inmates in area prisons. She hosts play groups in her apartment on the 20th floor of the Back Bay Manor in Roxbury. She takes her sister Fowzia's child into her care while Fowzia finishes a fellowship in neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She does the grocery shopping and prepares meals for her children and husband, an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women's.