ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON, JAN 19: Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist currently serving an 86-year sentence at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, has sought presidential pardon ahead of power transfer in the US, terming her jail term as “a blatant miscarriage of justice”.
Siddiqui, who has been languishing in US prison for over 14 years, hoped she would be freed after “new evidence” emerged which may suggest her innocence, Sky News reported.
She has maintained her innocence and hopes “the tide could now be turning”.
“I hope I am not forgotten, and I hope that one day soon I will be released,” she told the British news channel through her lawyer.
“I am… a victim of injustice, pure and simple. Every day is torture… it is not easy. One day, Inshallah (God-willing), I will be released from this torment.”
In a 76,500-word dossier, her counsel Clive Stafford Smith urged outgoing US President Joe Biden to issue a pardon for her client.
Her lawyer claims a catalogue of intelligence errors led to her initially becoming a suspect, citing witness testimonies that were unavailable at the time of her trial.
He alleges that, while Siddiqui was visiting Pakistan in 2003, she was abducted with her three children and handed to the CIA, which took her to Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
At the time of her trial in 2010, the judge stated: “There is no credible evidence in the record that the US officials and/or agencies detained Siddiqui” before her 2008 arrest, adding there is “no evidence in the record to substantiate these allegations or to establish them as fact”.
Her lawyer was of the view that the US intelligence “got the wrong end of the stick in the beginning” as agencies thought Siddiqui was a nuclear physicist working on a radioactive bomb “when she really did her PhD in education”.
