From the Archives: Who’s Afraid of Aafia Siddiqui?


1217944318In the October, 2004 issue of Boston magazine, Katherine Ozment profiled Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who had graduated from Brandeis and M.I.T., and lived in Boston with her husband, a physician at Brigham and Women’s. But the FBI suspected she was an Al-Qaeda operative. On Monday, Siddiqui was charged with “trying to kill American soldiers and FBI agents in a police station in Afghanistan.” She was transferred to New York and is to be arraigned today in U.S. district court.

The following passage is from Ozment’s story:

To those who knew her, Aafia Siddiqui was a kind, quiet woman living the normal life of a Pakistani expat in Boston. To the FBI, which displayed her photograph at that press conference in May, she was a suspected terrorist with ties to a chief mastermind of 9/11 — and the knowledge, skills, and intention to continue Al Qaeda’s terror war in the United States and abroad. Could one woman embody such diametrically opposed identities? Who is the real Aafia Siddiqui? And where has she gone?

Read the rest of the story here.

Image from NECN.com