Aafia thrown out of court during trial My children were tortured, this trial is a sham: Dr Aafia
NEW YORK: Pakistani national, Dr Aafia Siddiqui told the jurors at her trial that she was held in a secret prison in Afghanistan, her children were tortured, and the case against her is a sham.
Dr Siddiqui was thrown out of New York’s courtroom, where her trial was being held after giving the remarks. The MIT-educated neuroscientist is currently on trial, facing charges of trying to kill the US soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan in 2008 and connections with the Al-Qaeda operatives. She was ejected from her federal court’s trial after her second outburst, Bloomberg reported.
“Since I’ll never get a chance to speak,” she said in the courtroom. “If you were in a secret prison, or your children were tortured…” She insisted that she knew nothing about a plan to carry out terrorist attacks on targets in New York, The New York Daily News reported.
“Give me a little credit, this is not a list of targets of New York,” she said. “I was never planning to bomb it. You’re lying.”
Dr Aafia Siddiqui vanished in Karachi with her three children on March 30, 2003. The next day, it was reported in the local newspapers that she had been taken into custody on terrorism charges. The US officials alleged that Aafia Siddiqui was seized on July 17, 2008 by the Afghan security forces in the Ghazni province and claimed that documents, including formulas for explosives and chemical weapons, were found in her handbag. They said that while she was being interrogated, she grabbed a US warrant officer’s M-4 rifle and fired two shots at the FBI agents and military personnel but missed and that the warrant officer then fired back, hitting her in the torso. She was brought to the United States to face charges of attempted murder and assault.
Dr Aafia Siddiqui would face 20 years in prison if convicted. However, the human rights organizations have cast doubt on the accuracy of the US account of the event. Many political activists believed that she was Prisoner 650 of the US detention facility in Bagram, Afghanistan, where they say that she was tortured for five years until one day the US authorities announced that they had found her in Afghanistan.—Agencies
SOURCE : Regionaltimes.com
