Pakistan

On Saturday, outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, I will be speaking at an event marking the ninth anniversary of the disappearance in Pakistan of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, who vanished for five years and five months, and then mysteriously reappeared in Afghanistan in August 2008, where she was arrested, and then allegedly tried […]

Yesterday, while cross-posting a perceptive and shocking Guardian article by Declan Walsh about the state-sanctioned disappearances and murders of would-be separatists and critics of Pakistani policy in the vast tribal area of Balochistan, bordering Afghanistan and Iran, it occurred to me that, several months ago, when former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg (who is now the […]

Coming up tomorrow are new articles about Guantánamo and habeas corpus, and US intelligence and the Middle East, but to fill the vacuum today, here at Andy Worthington, I’m straying into the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands and cross-posting a distressing but extremely informative article from the Guardian by Declan Walsh, who has been investigating the little-reported disaster area […]

Regular readers will know that I have long been concerned by the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist whose story is one of the murkiest in the whole of the “War on Terror.” Dr. Siddiqui disappeared with her three children in Karachi in March 2003, and for five years neither the US nor […]

My thanks to an eagle-eyed supporter for pointing out that, on January 11, the Voice of the Cape radio station in South Africa interviewed Elaine Whitfield Sharp, the lawyer for Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist whose 86-year sentence in a New York courtroom last September — for allegedly trying and failing to shoot at […]

Last week, NBC News surprised everyone by featuring an interview conducted in Pakistan with Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a former Guantánamo prisoner — and an innocent man seized in Indonesia in January 2002, at a time when the Bush administration was out of control, kidnapping men around the world and subjecting them to “extraordinary rendition” […]

Last Tuesday, while activists, journalists and lawyers were holding a rally outside The White House to ask President Obama to honor his pledge to close Guantánamo, and to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 173 prisoners, Judge Richard Leon, in the District Court down the road, refused to grant the habeas petition of […]

Yesterday, Cageprisoners, the British NGO that works to raise awareness of the plight of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the “War on Terror,” announced that it had “helped spearhead roundtable talks with senior members of the Pakistan government over the repatriation of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui,” the Pakistani neuroscientist, […]

On November 14 — a very rainy Sunday in London — I was one of a number of speakers who gathered outside the Pakistani embassy for an event, “Bring Aafia Home,” which was organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, to urge the Pakistani government to do all it can to secure the return of […]

This is the seventh part of a nine-part series telling the stories of all the prisoners currently held in Guantánamo (174 at the time of writing). See the introduction here, and Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six. This seventh article tells the stories of 13 prisoners seized in […]