ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s prime minister has written a letter to US President Joe Biden asking for the release of a Pakistani woman serving an 86-year prison sentence in the US on terrorism charges, a government lawyer told the court on Friday.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s letter was submitted to an Islamabad court hearing a petition from the sister of Aafia Siddiqui, a US-trained neuroscientist who convicted in 2010 on charges including attempted murder of American citizens.
Siddiqui became a terrorism suspect after she left the US and married a cousin of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. She was injured during a confrontation with US authorities in Afghanistan in 2008. Witnesses say she the Americans shot.
According to a copy of Sharif’s letter, dated Oct. 13 and seen by The Associated Press, Prime Minister Biden informed that the woman had already served 16 years in prison.
He wrote that the case deserved to be “viewed with compassion.” Sharif said numerous Pakistani officials have visited her consularly over the years and raised serious concerns about the treatment she received, which seriously affected her already fragile mental health as well as fragile physical health.
“They even fear that she might commit suicide,” Sharif wrote of the Pakistani officials’ assessment.
He asked Biden to accept her sister’s request for clemency and order her release on humanitarian grounds.
Siddiqui’s “family and millions of my fellow citizens join me in seeking your blessings for a favorable outcome of this request,” he told Biden in the letter.
Siddiqui’s family insists she disappeared from Karachi in 2003 and accused the government of former dictator Pervez Musharraf of secretly handing her over to US officials.
Musharraf was in power when Pakistan became a US ally in the war on terror after the September 11 attacks. His government arrested dozens of suspects and turned them over to various governments, including Washington.
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Associated Press writer Asim Tanveer contributed to this story from Multan, Pakistan.