Afghanistan Frees Al-Qaida Suspect’s Young Son

By ASIF SHAHZAD

Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) – An al-Qaida suspect’s 12-year-old son, who was taken into custody with his mother and held for two months, was handed over to Pakistan Monday and returned to his relatives there.

The boy’s mother, Aafia Siddiqui, was detained outside the governor’s house in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province in July on suspicion of links to al-Qaida and taken to the U.S. military base there.

The American-educated Pakistani was then flown to New York to face charges of assault on U.S. personnel in Ghazni.

The U.S. indictment alleges that during Siddiqui’s interrogation in Ghazni, she picked up a soldier’s rifle, announced her “desire to kill Americans” and fired at U.S. soldiers and FBI agents.

She was wounded by return fire.

Her son Ali Hassan was with his mother at the time of her arrest and has been in Afghan custody ever since.

A spokesman for Afghanistan’s Foreign Ministry, Sultan Ahmed Baheen, said the boy has spent the last 10 days in a “guest house” of Afghanistan’s intelligence service.

Before that, the ministry said only that he was in the custody of the prosecutor who deals with minors.

Baheen said Ali Hassan is a dual American-Pakistani citizen because he was born in the U.S.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters the U.S. was following the latest developments closely.

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry and an aunt said Ali Hassan arrived later Monday and was returned to his relatives.

Siddiqui, 36, came to the United States in 1990 and studied at the University of Houston and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she got a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1995.

She later studied neuroscience as a graduate student at Brandeis University.

She vanished in Pakistan in 2003.

In 2004, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III identified Siddiqui as one of seven people the

FBI wanted to question about suspected ties to al-Qaida. Her family has vehemently denied any link.

Her lawyers claim that before she was arrested and brought to New York, Siddiqui was kidnapped by U.S. operatives and kept in secret captivity in Pakistan.

The ordeal, they said, left her with severe physical and mental problems.

U.S. officials deny she was ever in their captivity before she surfaced in Afghanistan in July.

Last week, a warden at a federal prison in Brooklyn notified a judge that Siddiqui is suffering from major depression.

The Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Baheen said Ali Hassan was adopted by Siddiqui after his biological parents were killed in a massive earthquake that struck Kashmir in 2005.

But Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Sadiq contradicted Baheen’s statement, saying the DNA tests done by U.S. authorities showed that the boy was Siddiqui’s biological son.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)