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Islamabad: The National Assembly yesterday sent a strong message to the United States demanding the repatriation of a woman suspected of links to the Al Qaida and facing charges of attempting to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Aafia Siddiqui, 36, a US-trained neuroscientist, was flown to the United States from Afghanistan early this month and was formally charged before a New York court.
"We call upon the federal government to take up the matter with US authorities," said Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, while reading out a resolution adopted unanimously by parliament's lower house.
Qureshi also called on US authorities to provide necessary medical assistance to Siddiqui, who is nursing a gunshot wound to the abdomen US officials say she suffered while firing on a group of American soldiers who wanted to question her in Afghanistan's Ghazni province.
Afghan police arrested Siddiqui after becoming suspicious of her behaviour outside the provincial governor's compound in Ghazni on July 17, according to the US Department of Justice.
Siddiqui had resurfaced after being declared missing for five years by human rights groups.
Her lawyers say they believed she had been secretly detained since March 2003, when she was last seen leaving her parents' home in Karachi. They argue she was held at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan by US authorities.
In 2004, Siddiqui was identified by the FBI as an "Al Qaida operative and facilitator who posed a clear and present danger to America."
Siddiqui was married to a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused mastermind of the September 11 terror attacks in New York. Her husband was captured in 2003 and is now held at the US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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