Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani-American neuroscientist arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 and sentenced to 86 years in prison for the attempted murder of FBI agents. John Kiriakou covered her arrest as a terrorism consultant for ABC News — the first story he covered in that role — when she was described as the most dangerous terrorist captured since Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.[1] He has returned to the case repeatedly since, and treats almost every element of the official account as unproven.
Who she was
Kiriakou sets her credentials out before the allegations. Siddiqui held a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD from Brandeis University, and worked in neuroscience: “the woman was absolutely brilliant.” Her sister is a doctorate-holding neurologist or neurosurgeon.[2][3][4]
She returned to Pakistan for a period after the 9/11 attacks, and again around the 2003 invasion of Afghanistan.[3] In Kiriakou’s most direct telling she “self-radicalized right around the time of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks” and, on returning to Pakistan, “volunteered to join al-Qaeda.”[4][5]
How she was taken
The chain begins with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured in 2002, who named her as an al-Qaeda courier and financier — in Kiriakou’s paraphrase, “there’s this woman Aafia Siddiqui. She’s really bad. I’m ratting her out. You need to grab her.” She was placed on the FBI’s Seeking Information — Terrorism list.[6][5]
Kiriakou’s caveat on that provenance is explicit: “We don’t know if she was a courier for al-Qaeda. And just because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said so doesn’t make it true.”[6]
What followed he describes as a hand-off down a chain of custody: “we found her in Karachi and we grabbed her. We asked the Pakistanis to grab her. They gave her to us and we took her to Afghanistan and locked her up” — from the Pakistanis to the Afghans, from the Afghans to the Americans, with the FBI flying out to begin the interrogation.[5][7] In the account he gave elsewhere, she and her three children were allegedly kidnapped in Pakistan around 2003 and she reappeared five years later in Ghazni, arrested by Afghan police and held for FBI questioning.[6]
The shooting that the case rests on
“Here’s where the stories all diverge,” Kiriakou says.[7]
The official version is that she was in a tent awaiting interrogation when an FBI agent leaned his M4 against the side of the tent; she seized it and tried to shoot him, the weapon jammed, and a second agent drew and shot her twice in the stomach. The agent’s own testimony, as Kiriakou quotes it, was that “I could see the barrel of the rifle… that indicated to me that it was pointed straight at my head.”[8][9] His caveat is the same one: “Again, we don’t know if that’s true.”[9]
She survived, was charged with attempted murder, was convicted and was given 86 years.[10][11] The measure Kiriakou reaches for is what the sentence was for: “She didn’t murder anybody. She didn’t even injure anybody” — and on her counsel’s account it is “the longest sentence ever given in American history to someone for attempted murder where there was no discharge of a weapon.”[10]
By 2025 his position on the underlying fact had hardened past agnosticism: evidence had emerged that she never fired at any FBI agent and never had a gun of her own — that an agent had set his own weapon down, she picked it up, and she was shot.[1]
The bullet holes in the tent
The physical evidence offered at trial was a photograph of two bullet holes in the canvas, presented as proof that she had got two shots off and had to be shot in return.[12]
It did not hold. Prisoners had been interrogated in that tent for months beforehand, and another photograph surfaced showing the same bullet holes in the same canvas weeks before Siddiqui was ever caught. Kiriakou’s conclusion is flat: “No, she did not fire the shot. She didn’t fire any shots.”[12][13][14]
The children
The part Kiriakou treats as more important than the conviction is what happened to her three children — a boy, a girl and an infant boy — and his statement on responsibility is unhedged: “We know now that it was the CIA that took custody of Aafia Siddiqui’s children.”[15][7]
In his fullest telling, the CIA “kidnapped all three of her children and they turned them over to Christian missionaries in Kabul.” The eldest son was adopted by a missionary family who changed his name; the middle child, the daughter, was adopted by another missionary family who changed hers. “No one ever figured out what happened to the baby.”[13][16]
The two older children were found and are adults now, reunited with Siddiqui’s sister in Pakistan, with whom they live.[17][18] How they were found is the Karzai admission below.
The youngest has never been found and would now be 18. The only account her lawyer has been able to obtain was verbal — that the baby had been dropped on his head and killed — and he does not believe it: “I think that’s complete and total” nonsense, in his view, and “the CIA just doesn’t want us to know where the baby is.”[19][20][18]
The search for the youngest child
The method is genealogical rather than legal. Siddiqui’s sister gave a DNA sample, which was registered with 23andMe, GEDmatch and the commercial ancestry databases; the infant’s photograph was aged by artificial intelligence to show what he would look like at 18.[20]
The litigation exists to generate attention rather than judgments. Her lawyer is suing the CIA and the FBI while saying plainly that he expects to win neither: “I know we’re not going to win any of these suits, but I’m hoping that the suits garner enough public attention that some 18-year-old dark-skinned kid out there is going to say, maybe this is me they’re talking about” — and takes a DNA test.[21]
Where she is now
Siddiqui is held at FMC Carswell, a maximum security medical prison, and has been in solitary confinement since 2008. Her lawyer told Kiriakou that she has “for all intents and purposes lost her mind”, and that the prison doctors maintain she is faking it — “it’s not from being in solitary confinement for the last 17 years. She’s just faking it.”[22]
The example Kiriakou gives is a Thanksgiving dinner she was served — turkey, potato stuffing, corn and pumpkin pie — and left untouched. Asked why, she said she was saving it for her son, “because he must be so hungry by now.” Staff wrote the episode up as evidence of malingering: “She’s faking this PTSD. She said that she’s waiting to feed her son and everybody knows her son is dead.”[22][23]
She does respond to letters, which Clive Stafford Smith will deliver.[23]
The campaign for her release
Kiriakou notes a large movement in Pakistan for her release or commutation, and says that after so many years “there are a lot of Americans that would like to see Aafia Siddiqui released on humanitarian grounds.”[15] Her counsel’s assessment is narrower and bleaker: “her only hope is that President Trump commutes her sentence and lets her go home to Pakistan” — and Kiriakou’s answer is that it is not going to happen.[24]