(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Councel for Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, Tina Foster, on Tuesday said Muslims get second class justice in the United States and if Pakistan did not make any serious efforts to bring Aafia home, then the American government would be at liberty to take any Pakistani in illegal detention.
Addressing to a press conference at the Lahore Press Club, Tina said Aafia’s court-appointed lawyers in the US would soon file her appeal challenging both her conviction and her 86-year sentence.
She said that if all Pakistanis and political parties stood united to bring Aafia home, the American government would listen. “The United States claims to have arrested Aafia in Pakistan and the US government should have sent her to Pakistan. But instead they took a Pakistani sister and illegally transferred her all the way to the US”, she added.
She said that the US government claimed that it’s the government’s right to imprison Aafia for the rest of her life thousands of miles away from her children and family, which she might never see again.
She warned that “if Pakistan allowed this result to stand, the US government would have a green light to hold any Pakistani citizen travelling abroad and illegally sent them to the United States, a country where Muslims get second class justice”.
She said that continuity of such outrageous injustice would put live of all the Pakistanis in jeopardy and it was not a matter of single Pakistani women. “If Pakistanis don’t stand up for Aafia, no one will be able to stand up for other Pakistanis at their need of hour”, Foster maintained.
She said that if Aafia’s conviction remained intact, in future all of Pakistan would be a prison. Talking about the miserable condition of Aafia, she said that Aafia was being held in solitary confinement, isolated in a small prison cell where no attorney or family member has been able to see her for many months now.
Aafia is now in a medical unit because she was suffering both mentally and physically, she added.
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