Lawyers for a scientist serving an 86 year prison sentence for shooting at US soldiers in Afghanistan told an appeals court Friday that she was so mentally ill, she should have been barred from testifying at her own trial.
Aafia Siddiqui, once a bright young student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, was branded a fugitive terror suspect after she left the US in 2003 and married a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master planner behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Her whereabouts were a mystery until she was detained in Afghanistan in 2008. A day later, she was wounded during a confrontation with US authorities who had gone to interrogate her. Six witnesses testified that she had grabbed a rifle and fired at the Americans. Siddiqui's lawyer, Dawn Cardi, told a three-judge panel of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday that even though her client was judged competent to stand trial, she was so disabled by paranoid schizophrenia that the court should have taken the unusual step of barring her from testifying.
"She had no intelligent understanding of what was going on," Cardi said. "She was not rational." Cardi also argued Siddiqui was in the throes of mental illness when she made incriminating statements to FBI agents at a hospital in Afghanistan following the shooting. At the time, she was on pain medication, was restrained to her bed and was being questioned for several hours each day.
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