The Tragic Case of the “The Gray Lady of Bagram”
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
The U.S. Government contends Aafia Siddiqui’s alleged links to terrorism began in June 2001—some three months before the 9/11 terror attacks on New York City’s Twin Towers. According to government sources, Siddiqui made a trip from Quetta, Pakistan to Monrovia, Liberia, where she was met by a car and driven to the Hotel Boulevard, a known al Qaeda safe house. A week later Siddiqui allegedly left Monrovia in the same inauspicious manner in which she arrived—the only difference being is that she carried with her a large parcel of Africa’s illegal diamonds, a hard-to-trace but key funding source for al Qaeda’s terror operations.
Nearly three years later on May 26, 2004 former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller held a new conference during which they announced the government had received reports that al Qaeda planned terror attacks in the U.S. that summer or fall. Director Mueller specifically named Aafia Siddiqui as “an al-Qaeda operative and facilitator” and one of the seven al-Qaeda suspects being sought in connection with the impending terror plots. Attorney General Ashcroft added the seven suspects posed “a clear and present danger” to America and should be “considered armed and dangerous.”
As soon as Siddiqui’s photo was displayed during the Ashcroft/Mueller news conference an informant was convinced Siddiqui was the same woman who went to Monrovia in June 2001 and left with the package of illegal diamonds. The informant called the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which was investigating Africa’s illegal diamond trade, and reported Siddiqui’s alleged ties to the diamond trade on behalf of al Qaeda.
Siddiqui’s family vigorously disputes the notion that Aafia was ever in Monrovia. They say she was living in the Back Bay Manor in Roxbury, Massachusetts taking care of her own three children and her sister’s child (while the sister finished a fellowship in neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital), as well as being a wife to her husband who was an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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