U.S. case against Pakistani doubted overseas

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As U.S. authorities took a purported al-Qaida operative to court on attempted murder and assault charges Tuesday in New York, her family, Afghan police and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan cast doubts on the accuracy of the American story.

On Monday, the Department of Justice said Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who was educated in the United States, had been taken into custody in mid-July in Afghanistan.

She was arraigned in court in New York on Tuesday, and her case has inflamed anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and triggered street protests against Siddiqui's detention.

According to the criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York, Siddiqui was arrested July 17 by Afghan security forces in Ghazni province in eastern Afghanistan with her 12-year-old son.

She was found with documentation on explosives, descriptions of U.S. landmarks and various chemical substances, the complaint says, and a day later, she was handed over to U.S. intelligence and military officials.

The complaint says she got hold of an officer's M-4 rifle in an interrogation room and fired two shots, which missed. The officer used his pistol to fire back and hit her at least once in the torso, according to the charges.

But Afghan police said U.S. soldiers demanded that local police hand over Siddiqui, but they refused, according to a report from Ghazni by Reuters news agency. When the Americans disarmed the Afghan police at gunpoint, Siddiqui approached the Americans and complained of mistreatment by the police, according to this account.

The U.S. troops, according to an unnamed Afghan police officer, "thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her," Reuters reported.

Siddiqui's family, meanwhile, says she'd been in secret custody since she disappeared five years ago from the Pakistani city of Karachi with her three children, and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization, called the U.S. account a "cock-and-bull story."

A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said in Washington that the allegations weren't true.

Legal experts in the United States said the case against Siddiqui might reflect a new willingness by the Bush administration to prosecute some terror suspects in federal court rather than before military commissions at the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Siddiqui's family and activists think she was in the hands of Pakistani intelligence and then handed over to the United States.

Several former detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have said they heard the screams of a woman, who's been dubbed "The Gray Lady of Bagram."

Fauzia Siddiqui, Aafia Siddiqui's sister, and Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist turned human-rights campaigner, said they think the cries came from Aafia Siddiqui, who they say was physically and sexually abused at the air base.

The Pentagon has denied that any women are held at Bagram.

It's unclear what's happened to her son or her other two children.

Siddiqui has been on the FBI and CIA wanted list for years.