Imran Khan and Yvonne Ridley broke the news on July 7 at a press conference at Islamabad that the woman prisoner No. 650 in the notorious US jail of Bagram, Afghanistan, was Dr Aafia Siddiqui. Now the same persons from the same place are stating that prisoner No. 650 was not Dr Siddiqui rather she was some other Muslim woman.
The basis of this drastic change in their stand has been reported by Ms Ridley to be a letter by the American ambassador in the UK to Lord Nazir Ahmad (a Britisher of Pakistani origin) wherein the latter has been informed that the prisoner No. 650 at the Bagram Jail was not Dr Siddiqui rather she was some other Muslim lady who has since been repatriated to her parent country (neither the name of the victimised lady nor that of her country has been given).
While faithfully accepting the assertion of the American ambassador in the UK, both Imran and and Ms Ridley have acted extra-simply and over-innocently.
They even forgot the recent (of Aug 16) letter of another US ambassador (US ambassador in Islamabad) regarding Aafia Siddiqui and her children, published in all of the main newspapers of Pakistan, which was full of untruths and which has been criticised by numerous letter-writers in the country and is still being criticised.
The US ambassador in the UK has simply tried, through his ‘honest’ statement to Lord Nazir Ahmad, to mislead the people and to deprive Aafia Siddiqui of the sympathies of the masses the world over, and the oversimple Imran Khan and Ms Ridley have fallen prey to his trap.
The fact is that the so-called woman prisoner No. 650 was Dr Aafia Siddiqui and her late-night screams belonged, most probably, to that period when she was undergoing forced plastic surgery of her face by the American.
During her recent meeting with a group of senators of Pakistan, who were specially deputed by the government of Pakistan to see her, Dr Siddiqui categorically stated that she, along with her three children, was kidnapped in Karachi by a foreign agency, transported to Afghanistan and kept and tortured physically and mentally at the Bagram Jail of the US (according to a report published in a section of the press on Oct 15).
M. A. FARIDI
Islamabad
