Pakistani couple sought in Qaeda hunt

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: The FBI is seeking a Pakistani couple for its links to a Saudi resident of South Florida with suspected Al Qaeda connections.

The Bureau’s Baltimore office said it was looking for Dr Aafia Siddiqui, 31, and her husband Mohammed Khan, 33, about possible terrorist activities.

The couple is suspected of having links with Adnan G El Shukrijumah, 27, who once lived in Miami but has since disappeared. The US agency believes he has links with Al Qaeda.

The FBI is looking for El Shukrijumah after an alias he used turned up in various places, including during the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Dr Siddiqui, a resident of the Boston area, is said to have visited Gaithersburg, Maryland, in December last year or January, but the FBI would not say what significance that visit had and whom she met. The agency believes she may have valuable information.

Dr Siddiqui has a PhD in neurological science and has studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, Massachusetts, as well as at Houston, Texas. The FBI believes Dr Siddiqui is now in Pakistan. While at MIT, she wrote a paper on the mechanics of setting up a Muslim student organisation. Both she and her husband were office-bearers of the Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching Inc.

In another development, the authorities announced this week that they would be interrogating 11,000 Iraqis living in the US, most of them American citizens. The move was immediately denounced as ‘racial profiling’.

“So we’ve got now suspicion predicated only on national origin extending to US citizens,” according to David Cole of Georgetown University. “That’s exactly what we had during World War-II with Japanese Americans. What you see when you look at history is that measures that are adopted initially during wartime often get extended into peacetime and often get expanded to reach a broad segment of the American public.”

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