Pakistan takes allegations of rape of jailed neuroscientist in US ‘very seriously’

By Aamir Latif

KARACHI, Pakistan (AA) - Pakistan on Thursday said it takes the allegations of sexual abuse and rape of incarcerated Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui at a US jail “very seriously,” and will take up the issue with Washington.

Siddiqui, 49, who has been jailed in a federal US prison after being convicted of attacking a US soldier during an investigation in Afghanistan, has been repeatedly “raped” and “sexually abused” by prison guards and prisoners, her lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, told local broadcaster Geo News on Tuesday.

Smith, who met Siddiqui earlier this week at the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where she is serving an 86-year sentence, said he was “ashamed of” what the US prison system had done to Siddiqui.

It was a British journalist, Yvonne Ridley, who revealed the presence of Siddiqui at the Bagram detention center in 2008.

“The statements that have been made are serious statements. And the government of Pakistan takes them very seriously,” Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, said at a weekly briefing in the capital Islamabad.

“We will be taking up this issue with the US Department of State to investigate and to share the findings with us,” she added.

“In the past as well, we have repeatedly requested the US Department of State and the Department of Justice as well as the prison authorities of the Federal Medical Center in Carswell that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui should not be subjected to any sort of physical or mental abuse,” she said.

“The well-being of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui remains our utmost priority,” she maintained.

Aafia’s elder sister, Fouzia Siddiqui, is currently in the US to meet her in jail.