Aafia Siddiqui
Pakistani-American neuroscientist and terrorist (born 1972)
Aafia Siddiqui (born 2 March 1972) is a Pakistani neuroscientist and educator who gained international attention following her conviction in the United States and is currently serving an 86-year sentence for attempted murder and other felonies at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, in Fort Worth, Texas.
Siddiqui was born in Pakistan to a Sunni Muslim family. For a period from 1990, she studied in the United States and obtained from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a BS in biology in 1995, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University in 2001. She returned to Pakistan for a time following the 9/11 attacks and again in 2003 during the war in Afghanistan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad named her a courier and financier for al-Qaeda, and she was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigations's Seeking Information – Terrorism list; she was the first woman to have been featured on the list. Around this time, she and her three children were allegedly kidnapped in Pakistan.
Five years later, she reappeared in Ghazni, Afghanistan, and was arrested by Afghan police and held for questioning by the FBI. While in custody, Siddiqui allegedly told the FBI she had gone into hiding but later disavowed her testimony and stated she had been abducted and imprisoned. Supporters believe she was held captive at Bagram Air Force Base as a ghost detainee, an allegation the US government denies. During her second day in custody, she shot at visiting U.S. FBI and Army personnel with an M4 carbine an interrogator had placed on the floor by his feet. She was shot in the torso when a warrant officer returned fire.
“Aafia Siddiqui” enters the record as pakistani-American neuroscientist and terrorist (born 1972). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aafia, Siddiqui and Pakistani-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q300786. VIAF identifies the subject as 86284338. The Library of Congress control number is n2009208996. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 1990, 1995 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aafia Siddiqui” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.