Where he will be as free as a bird, living with his family. As for 10 and 13 year old Christian girls abducted, raped, and forced into conversion, the Pakistani government is having a real hard time deciding on whether to return them to their family.
“Afghanistan frees al-Qaeda suspect’s young son,” from AP, September 15:
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) “” An al-Qaeda suspect’s 12-year-old son, who was taken into custody with his mother and held for two months, was handed over to Pakistan on Monday to be returned to 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-Qaeda and taken to the U.S. military base there. The Pakistani-American citizen 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, also a dual American-Pakistani national, 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 he was in the custody of the prosecutor who deals with minors.
Ali Hassan was expected to arrive in Pakistan later Monday and be handed over to his mother’s 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…