NEW YORK (AFP) — Aafia Siddiqui cut a ghostly figure in a New York courtroom this week -- not surprisingly for someone who during five years seemed to have vanished from the face of the Earth.
US prosecutors say Siddiqui, 36, is a desperate would-be terrorist who was arrested in Afghanistan, then on July 18 opened fire on US army and FBI officers, before being shot, wounded and subdued.
But in court Tuesday, all that seemed sure, given Siddiqui's obvious frailty, was that she had recently been shot. The wound, her lawyer Elizabeth Fink said, is still "oozing."
Nothing else has been clear about the Pakistani neuroscientist since March 2003, when she disappeared in Karachi along with her three children, then aged seven, five and six months.
No one has explained where Siddiqui, a diminutive woman who was once a star student at top US universities, has been in the last five years.
No one has explained where her children are today.
"These are the two key questions," said Joanne Mariner, counter-terrorism expert at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in New York. "It's really, really mysterious."
Frequently she is referred to in the media as an Al-Qaeda suspect, but the evidence is fragmentary.
Living in the United States at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she was briefly detained and questioned over support for Islamic charities seen as suspicious. She was never charged.
In 2003 alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheikh Mohammed named her under interrogation and in 2004 she appeared on a US list of alleged Al-Qaeda operatives.
Yet Mohammed's testimony has since been discredited by revelations that he was tortured in US custody.
While some media outlets have also reported that she married one of Mohammed's nephews, her family denies this. Defense lawyers say they have doubts and are checking.
Prosecutors in New York are charging her with assault and attempted murder, but they are not linking her to Al-Qaeda.
Defense lawyers claim the alleged shoot-out with FBI and US army officers in Afghanistan was invented to cover up the truth about Siddiqui's disappearance into a secret US prison system.
Siddiqui vanished in March 2003 from Karachi at a time of intense efforts by US-backed Pakistani security forces to root out Al-Qaeda.
A woman, as well as a brilliant graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University, near Boston, Siddiqui was far from a typical Al-Qaeda suspect.
But Sam Zarifi, Asia director for Amnesty International, says that hundreds of people disappeared into a legal vacuum after such operations -- and that Siddiqui may have been sucked in too.
"Regardless of what happened to her, she really fits the pattern of hundreds of others that Amnesty International has documented, where people disappeared and ended up in US custody," he said by telephone from London.
Relatives believe that after leaving her parents' house in Karachi she and her children were kidnapped, handed over to US forces and imprisoned illegally at the Bagram base in Afghanistan.
Defense lawyers said Tuesday they'd had too little time to find out from their client what had happened, but that she spoke of having been incarcerated and "abused."
Some human rights activists believe she was none other than Bagram's near-legendary "prisoner 650," a solitary woman inmate at the base whom other detainees claim to have heard screaming.
"I've interviewed detainees who said there was a woman at Bagram in 2003 and 2004," HRW's Mariner said. "There's strong evidence to support the idea that there was a woman. But no one I've spoken to knew who that woman was."
More technical details of the case against her in New York are also raising difficult questions.
Siddiqui is said to have first been apprehended in Afghanistan with a bag full of suspicious liquids in glass containers. But whether those liquids were in fact dangerous is not stated.
In the alleged struggle at a police station, prosecutors indicate they do not know how many rounds Siddiqui allegedly fired, or even how many bullets struck her.
Defense lawyers also want to know under what jurisdiction Siddiqui was held between the alleged July 18 incident and this Monday, when prosecutors say she was formally arrested and flown to the United States.
So far Siddiqui has revealed little of her version.
Asked by the judge at her initial hearing on Tuesday whether she understood the charges as read out, she answered in a feeble voice: "Yes."
Then she shook her head.
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