There is a daily account of Aafia's trial on CagePrisoners, so I am just going to post it as it appears.

This week the long awaited trial of Aafia Siddiqui began in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. Her case has been one of the most baffling in the annals of post-9/11 terrorism prosecutions. Siddiqui, as regular readers of this website know, is a 37-year-old, MIT-educated neuroscientist, who lived in the U.S. for ten years before mysteriously vanishing from Karachi, her hometown, in 2003, along with her three children, two of whom are American born. For five years her whereabouts remained unknown, while rumors swirled that she was an Al Qaeda operative, and that she had married Ammar al Baluchi, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and one of the five accused 9/11 plotters expected to face trial in the U.S. In July 2008 she was picked up in Ghazni, Afghanistan on suspicion of being a suicide bomber. The following day, as a team of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents arrived to question her at the police station where she was being held, she allegedly managed to get hold of an M-4 automatic rifle belonging to one of the soldiers, and, according to prosecutors, she opened fire. She hit no one but was herself hit in the abdomen by return fire. What is known is that the U.S. considered Siddiqui to be someone connected to a number of high level terrorism suspects. They say she went on the run and remained underground during her missing years. But human rights groups have long held that Siddiqui is no extremist and believe she was illegally detained and interrogated by Pakistani intelligence at the behest of the U.S. She now faces charges of attempted murder. Her trial is expected to last two weeks.









Testimony continued with the direct examination of FBI Special Agent John Jefferson. Jefferson, who was on the stand yesterday afternoon, continued to recount the scene of the shooting in Ghazni. He said that just after Siddiqui was shot, his partner Eric Negron called out to him for handcuffs. "There was a pool of blood on the right side," he said. Jefferson assisted Negron in subduing Siddiqui and cuffed her hands and her ankles. Jefferson said a stretcher was brought up to the room (an account that differs from that of Captain Snyder, who testified yesterday that the stairs were too narrow and so he had personally carried Siddiqui down to the Humvee). Jefferson said that by the time he and the others got downstairs a tense scene had unfolded as approximately twenty armed Afghan National Police officers had assembled outside. Jefferson said he remembers seeing a rocket propelled grenade launcher pointed at his head.




Siddiqui was then transported to the forward operating base in Ghazni and put in a small triage unit. Jefferson recalled that shortly afterwards he saw two Afghan intelligence officers who had been in the room at the time of the shooting. They had with them "a document stating that they did not have anything to do with what just occurred," and asked Jefferson and his partner to sign it to absolve them of any responsibility for the shooting. "We were like, we're not allowed to sign anything," said Jefferson.




At the Ghazni triage Siddiqui was given just enough medical attention "to sustain her," and was then flown by Black Hawk helicopter to another forward operating base in Afghanistan known as "Organ-E," where she underwent surgery. Jefferson and Negron were on the flight, along with the pilot and a crew chief who doubled as a medic. Afterwards Siddiqui was transported to Bagram Air Base, arriving at approximately 1 a.m. Jefferson brought with him brown paper bags containing the documents that Siddiqui was allegedly found with in Ghazni. The thumb drive, which had apparently gotten misplaced while in Ghazni was delivered to Bagram shortly after he arrived with Siddiqui.




On cross examination, defense attorney Linda Moreno asked if Jefferson had seen Siddiqui either touch or fire a weapon in Ghazni. He said no. She went over his statement to the FBI on July 21, 2008, just a few days after the shooting, where he said he heard four rounds fired in the room in Ghazni, but did not describe the nature of the rounds in his statement. On the previous day of testimony Jefferson had said he was certain that he heard two sets of shots that had each come from a different gun. Jefferson said that given his long experience with firearms, "there is no doubt in my mind that two rounds came from different weapons."




The government's next witness was Ahmad Gul, an Afghan translator present in the room in Ghazni. Gul, 27 years old, was born in Afghanistan and lived in Pakistan for a time before returning to his native country to work as a translator with the U.S Army. He speaks Dari, Farsi, Urdu, and English. Gul explained how translators are generally assigned to a specific person in a unit, mostly warrant officers and captains. In the summer of 2008, Gul "mostly went out with the chief warrant officer." He was with the warrant officer's team as they went into the room where Siddiqui was being held behind the curtain. Gul was positioned with the rest of the U.S. team and the other Afghans present to the right of the curtain. "I turned around and I hit the curtain with my left hand and I saw a female holding a gun pointed at the chief warrant officer and the ministry of interior representatives, and she shot the gun," he said. "Right away I lunged towards her and I pushed her towards the wall." Gul said he grabbed both the barrel and the stock of the gun and struggled to gain control of the weapon. "I was worried I'd get shot and at that time she shot again." The second bullet, he said, went in the same direction as the first. The struggle continued, and "she pushed me back into the middle of the room," he said. "The chief warrant officer was two meters behind me with his pistol shooting towards me while I was wrestling with the female detainee." The warrant officer then shot Siddiqui, despite the fact that she was using Gul as a shield. "As soon as she was shot, right away I snatched her gun. The chief warrant officer pushed her towards the bed."




The question of whether the warrant officer checked behind the curtain at some point before the shooting occurred was revisited on cross examination by Linda Moreno. Earlier Gul said the warrant officer did not look behind the curtain, but when asked the question by Moreno he said he didn't know. Moreno showed him a statement he gave to the FBI less than a week after the shooting, which apparently contradicted the answer he had just given her, but he said he did not remember giving the statement and later said he did remember giving the statement but that he did not telling the agents what was written there. She asked if he had read and initialed every paragraph at the time he gave the statement and he said he had. Moreno also asked Gul to elaborate on help he's received from the U.S. since the shooting. Gul said the U.S. sponsored his visa and his flight to the U.S. was paid for. He was given money for rent, food and transportation ("less than $4,000," he said). She also asked about his contact with the warrant officer since the shooting, which includes emails and phone calls. Gul said he considered the officer a "brother and a friend."




The government then introduced a series of forensic experts, FBI Special Agent Dale Hutson, who photographed the materials allegedly seized with Siddiqui in Ghazni. He also fingerprinted Siddiqui when she was at Bagram Air Base. Hutson said the M-4 rifle which Siddiqui allegedly fired was not among the materials he catalogued, but arrived some days later. FBI Special Agent Todd Schmitt told jurors he transported the materials from Bagram to Washington DC in his backpack, which he kept with him at all times during the flight. He did not bring the rifle back with him. Special Agent Shelly Sine took fingerprint impressions from Siddiqui in New York in August 2008, shortly after she was flown in from Ghazni.




The day's final witness, D.J. Fife, is a physical scientist and forensic examiner with the FBI. Fife was tasked with obtaining latent prints from the documents and other materials brought in from Ghazni, including the rifle, which was eventually flown to FBI headquarters in Quantico, VA. Fife described the various processes by which latent prints can be obtained and how a multitude of factors affect the ability to get a usable print. He told jurors that of 106 pages of documents he received from Ghazni, 33 pages had some kinds of fingerprints of value. He also described examining the rifle but said that he was unable to get any usable latent prints from it. Fife described the process, which includes exposing the surface to Superglue vapors that bind to any moisture on the surface and can sometimes reveal latent prints. He found no prints on the rifle. Fife said that it was not unusual for a gun to yield no usable prints, because any fingerprints on non-porous surfaces (like metal) can easily be smudged or wiped off, even by casual contact. He also said the rifle's surfaces are not smooth but "stibbled" to provide for easy grip, and that these types of surfaces do not yield good prints.

Cross examination of Fife's begins Jan 21, DAY 3, USA v. Siddiqui.