Pak woman on FBI terror list arrested

Authorities believe Siddiqui used the technical skills she acquired at MIT to do what virtually no other woman has accomplished— work her way into the clubby inner circles of al-Qaeda’s command and control operation, including its chemical and biological weapons programme.

But questions swirled around her Monday evening, including whether she has been in Pakistani custody for at least part of the past five years and whether there is hard evidence that she was a trained, committed and hardened al-Qaeda operative, as former attorney general John Ashcroft and other officials have contended.

“This doesn’t pass the sniff test,” Elaine W Sharp, a Massachusetts defence lawyer representing Siddiqui, said of the circumstances surrounding her client’s arrest. She said her client was not an al-Qaeda terrorist, but an innocent woman who had been held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or elsewhere for the past several years and tortured by some combination of US, Pakistani and Afghan officials.

Sharp said Siddiqui had obtained an undergraduate biology degree from MIT and a Ph.D. in behavioural neuroscience from Brandeis University, both near Boston, and that she had lived a quiet life in the Boston area, and Houston before that, before returning to Pakistan in late 2002.

One senior US federal law enforcement official refused to comment on the case, except to say that Siddiqui was an extremely significant catch and that authorities had pledged not to discuss any details of the operation because of its sensitivity and relationship to ongoing counter-terrorism operations. “We can’t say anything about this one,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He confirmed that the woman in custody was the one near the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted List of fugitive terrorism suspects wanted for questioning.

For years, the FBI and the CIA have been desperately trying to find Siddiqui, who they say spent several years in Boston as a “fixer” for admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, providing haven and logistical support for terrorist operatives that he sent to the United States to launch attacks. Siddiqui also bought diamonds in Liberia as part of al-Qaeda financing efforts and married Mohammed’s nephew, Ali Abd Al Aziz Ali, according to several US counter-terrorism officials and government documents.

One former CIA clandestine service case agent who tracked Siddiqui said she became extremely frustrated several years ago, however, when she was told by senior al-Qaeda leaders to help their cause by getting pregnant.

“They told her that the best thing she could do for al-Qaeda was to start popping out little jihadists,” said the former CIA officer, who is now a private contractor working for the US government on counter-terrorism issues. “She was furious; she knows more about this stuff than pretty much anyone in the organisation.”

Siddiqui never gave up her desire to launch attacks against the United States and its allies, according to FBI and Justice Department records made public Monday night.