The message from the militants was revealing.
“You were given many chances to negotiate the release of your people via cash transactions as other governments have accepted,” it said. “We have also offered prisoner exchanges to free the Muslims currently in your detention, like our sister Dr Aafia Siddiqui. However, you proved very quickly to us that this is not what you are interested in.”
This message, sent to the employers of American journalist James Foley by fighters belonging to the Islamic State (IS), highlighted an audacious gambit: they had sought to exchange Foley for a Pakistani woman who has been dubbed Lady al-Qa’ida and who was once described as the world’s most wanted woman, but whom her family insist is an innocent victim. The IS also wanted £80m.
According a report by The Independent, the Obama administration declined to consider either option and the 40-year-old American journalist was subsequently beheaded, a video recording of the execution being posted on the internet.
Amid the outrage and horror over the stark, shuddering murder of Foley, the offer made by the militants for Siddiqui has also led to fresh questions about the curious case of the 42-year-old mother-of-three, whose release from US custody the IS fighters were seeking. Who is she and why were the IS fighters interested in her?
Aafia Siddiqui was born in Karachi and grew up in an upper middle class family before travelling to the US to study. Siddiqui, whose mother once served in Pakistan’s parliament and whose father trained in the UK to be a doctor, began her studies at the University of Houston in Texas before moving to Massachusetts and earning a PhD in neuroscience from Brandeis University.
She and her first husband, Amjad Mohammed Khan, an anaesthesiologist whom she wed in an arranged marriage, left the US after the attacks of September 2001, eventually returning to the Karachi in the summer of 2002. While still in the US, the FBI questioned Siddiqui and her husband regarding their purchase over the internet of £6,000 worth of night vision equipment and body armour. They said it was for hunting.
Siddiqui and her husband divorced in late 2002. He would later claim she had become too abusive and that he was concerned about her increasingly extremist views.
Shortly after the divorce, Siddiqui allegedly married Ammar al-Baluchi, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the al-Qa’ida attacks on New York and Washington. To this day, her family deny this marriage happened and say this was a story invented by the Western media.
In March 2003, Siddiqui and her three children disappeared, after the FBI announced a global “wanted for questioning” alert for her and her first husband. [Khan was questioned over alleged terror links and released without charge.] It is believed her name as a possible al-Qa’ida operative was mentioned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was repeatedly questioned and tortured by the US after he was arrested in Rawalpindi at the beginning of March 2003.
There remains an intense and ongoing debate about what happened to them during the next five years. Some believe Siddiqui and her children were held by the Pakistani authorities, while her family say she was a “ghost prisoner” of the US and kept in a secret prison at Bagram airbase.
Her ex-husband believes she and her children spent those years at large in Pakistan, under the eye of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).
The next confirmed sighting of her was in the summer of 2008 when she was detained in Afghanistan after being discovered close to the home of a senior official in Ghazni province. On her possession were documents describing the production of explosives, chemical weapons and the Ebola virus, and hand-written notes referring to a “mass casualty attack” in the US.
The diminutive Siddiqui was eventually convicted in the US, not on terror-related charges, but on counts of attempted murder – charges resulting from the claim, denied by her, that she tried to shoot her US questioners while in Afghanistan. She was sentenced to 86 years in jail and is currently being held at the Federal Medical Centre in Carswell, Texas, which houses female prisoners with mental health issues. Prisoner number 90279-054 is not due for release until 2083.
Since the release of the IS email that referred to Siddiqui, there has been much speculation among experts about what it may signify.
Dr Farzana Shaikh, a Pakistan scholar at Chatham House in London, said IS may have been prompted by one of several militant groups in Pakistan who have called for Siddiqui’s release in exchange for Shakil Afridi. The case of Afridi, a doctor who was recruited by the CIA to try and locate Osama bin Laden and later charged with treason by Pakistan, is due to be reviewed again shortly.