By Fahad Ansari

On May 3, 2007, just days before her 4th birthday, British girl Madeleine McCann disappeared while on holiday with her parents and twin siblings in the Algarve region of Portugal. Over subsequent months, the case received international media coverage with daily coverage in Britain, Portugal and indeed globally. In addition to official investigations by the Portuguese and British police forces, at least five private investigation firms were engaged by a British tycoon, a former Metropolitan Police Detective Superintendent, US firms and a Portuguese lawyer, to carry out inquiries. Elaborate video reconstructions, televised pleas for assistance and endorsements by celebrities followed. With such global effort to locate the missing child, it was not surprising that the name Madeleine McCann was the topic of conversation in coffee shops, hairdresser salons, schools and campuses worldwide. Tragically, despite these efforts, Madeleine has not been found so far.

   On March 28, 2003, another four-year-old girl, Maryam Siddiqui, disappeared in Pakistan alongwith her mother and two siblings. Maryam reappeared at her home in Karachi in early April in equally bizarre circumstances claiming she was kept in a “cold, dark room” for seven years, reportedly in the notorious Bagram prison. Apart from a few lone voices attempting to raise awareness about the case, there has been deafening silence regarding the issue until the summer of 2008. Why? Unlike Madeleine, Maryam’s kidnapping appears to have been at the instigation of the US government.

  It is worth delving into the background of this case to provide some context. On July 7, 2008, following a press conference in Pakistan led by British journalist Yvonne Ridley, the case of Maryam’s mother, Aafia Siddiqui began to receive international coverage and resulted in a series of political inquiries in Pakistan and the UK. After all, Siddiqui and her children had been missing for more than five years in very mysterious circumstances. Within two weeks of the July 2008 press conference, US officials reported that Siddiqui had been arrested earlier that month by Afghan forces along with her then 11-year-old son Ahmed, outside the governor of Ghazni’s compound, allegedly with manuals on explosives and “dangerous substances in sealed jars” on her person. Aafia Siddiqui was later extradited to the US and despite a plethora of discrepancies in the evidence against her, she was convicted in January 2010 of attempting to murder US personnel in Afghanistan. No terrorism charges were brought against her at any time.

   Siddiqui and her lawyers have maintained throughout that she and her children were abducted in 2003 and detained in secret prisons since that time. Siddiqui alleges that she was tortured, raped and abused during this period and forced to walk naked over a desecrated copy of the Qu’ran. Throughout her detention, she knew nothing of her children’s well-being or whereabouts although her interrogators threatened to torture and harm them if she did not cooperate. Siddiqui’s mother described how an intelligence agency official came to her house a week after the incident, and warned her not to make an issue out of her daughter’s disappearance or she would never see them again. Both the Pakistani government as well as US officials in Washington denied any knowledge of their detention.

   However, in late August 2008, the lies began to unravel. First, Michael G. Garcia, US attorney general of the southern region of New York, confirmed in a letter to Siddiqui’s sister, Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui, that her son, Ahmed had been in the custody of the FBI since 2003 and that he was currently in the custody of the Karzai government in Afghanistan. Earlier the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson had claimed that Washington had no information regarding the children. Ahmed was finally released to the custody of Siddiqui’s family in Pakistan in September 2009. He later gave a statement to police in Lahore that he had been held in a juvenile prison in Afghanistan for years. In February 2010 Ahmed described how, when he, his mother and siblings came out of their home, 15 to 20 people, including a “white lady” and members of the Pakistan intelligence service, the ISI, were waiting in three to four vehicles on the next street and subsequently kidnapped them. His mother was shoved into one black car and he and his crying siblings into another.

   On Sunday, April 4, 2010, a 12-year-old girl was brought by unidentified men to the family residence in Karachi. The girl told the Siddiqui family that her name was Fatima and that she could only speak English and Persian. Days later, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik revealed that a DNA test proved that the girl’s DNA matched that of her brother Ahmed and Siddiqui’s ex-husband Dr. Amjad Khan, confirming that she was in fact, Maryam, the missing daughter of Aafia Siddiqui. Chairman of Pakistani Senate’s Standing Committee on the Interior, Senator Talha Mehmood, further divulged that Maryam was recovered from Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan where she was with an American man named “John”. He said she had been kept in a “cold, dark room” at the US airbase in Bagram for the past seven years.

   Siddiqui’s youngest child, Suleman — only six months old at the time of his disappearance, remains unaccounted for. Rumours, apparently confirmed by Siddiqui’s lawyer Elaine Sharpe after her trial, circulated for years that he was killed at the time of his abduction.  Siddiqui was later shown a picture of her baby, lying in a pool of blood. It is not known whether he is still alive.

   Regardless of the allegations against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, answers must be provided pertaining to the disappearance and apparent detention of her three children. The world was shocked when it emerged that teenagers were being held at Guantanamo Bay. Some of those, like Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, have matured into adults during their imprisonment and remain there to this day. What we are dealing with in this case are toddlers who have been treated as terror suspects. With official US lies finally unravelling and Pakistani streets raging with protestors and with week-long vigils launched in London and New York, the Western media’s refusal to report this case reflects the state of denial they continue to indulge in. Unlike the case of Madeleine McCann which appears to have involved a regular kidnapping by persons unknown, it is too disturbing a thought to suppose that in Maryam’s case, the US government may have imprisoned these young children in a foreign detention facility, notorious for torture and murder of detainees, away from family and friends for seven years. It is even more horrifying to think that they may have murdered a young baby during the kidnapping.

   The tragic reality is that Maryam is not the first four-year-old girl to be detained in the War on Terror. An American four-year-old girl, Rahma Maldonado and Kenyan Hafsa Swaleh were among other children detained in inhumane conditions away from their parents in the Horn of Africa. Their only “crime” was that they were the children of terror suspects. Although their detention was far shorter, the fact that it warranted little, if any, attention in the Western media suggests that when it comes to Muslim children detained in the War on Terror, not all children are equal.

   We may never know the full truth and reality of what Ahmed, Maryam and Suleman have had to endure for the last seven years but silence by the Western media outlets to even raise some difficult questions, no matter how distressing the answers may be, is troubling. Madeleine McCann and Maryam Siddiqui were two toddlers, worlds apart, but who lived the same reality: abduction. For both, it was the worst of times. Why then the double-standards?

Fahad Ansari is a spokesman for Justice for Aafia Coalition (JFAC ). For further information visit www.justiceforaafia.org.