Preet Bharara, a CNN legal analyst and the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, shared details from the prosecution of Aafia Siddiqui with CNN Newsroom host Jim Acosta.
The 2010 case was back in the headlines on Saturday after Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British citizen, took four people hostage at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. After releasing one hostage in the afternoon, Akram was killed shortly after 9:00 pm CT during a standoff with the hostage rescue team. The remaining three hostages escaped unharmed. Before he died, Akram repeatedly referenced Siddiqui’s case and demanded her release from a federal prison in Texas.
Bharara had led the prosecution team for the criminal case against Siddiqui, who is currently serving an 86-year sentence at a federal prison in Texas. Siddiqui has become “an icon among Islamic terrorists,” Acosta said, before turning to Bharara to share his recollections about the case.
Siddiqui has been in prison for over 12 years, Bharara said. He described her as “a highly educated, extremely smart person who became a neuroscientist, educated at M.I.T., got her PhD at Brandeis University” who had been “radicalized after 9/11.”
Authorities started looking for her in the mid-2000s, he said, suspecting her of having developed terrorist ties, and found her in Afghanistan, as Bharara described:
She was found in Afghanistan in 2008. And on her person, or in a bag
on her person, were found, among other things, two pounds of sodium cyanide, bomb-making plans, what looked like an apparent list of targets including Grand Central Station, the Statue of Liberty.And she was taken to be questioned in a building in a small town in Afghanistan. And while she was on the second floor, members of the 101st Airborne of the United States military showed up to join in the questioning. And in a moment that was unexpected by the folks who were doing the questioning, she took a firearm, an M-4 from one of the people who was the room, one of the military people in the room, and she began firing at everyone in the room. Luckily it didn’t hit anyone.While she was firing, she was stating anti-American sentiment, “I want to kill as many f-ing Americans as I can.” She was taken into custody, after being shot and taken care of, and then sent to New York for prosecution.
Siddiqui’s trial took place in January 2010, and the court had to take what Bharara called a “highly unusual” step of having her watch much of her own trial via a live feed from her prison cell, because she kept making outbursts in court, anti-Semitic and other comments.
She was convicted and got a “very significant sentence,” Bharara said, because of the nature of the crime, the terrorism enhancement, and the
Her sentence had made her a martyr in the eyes of people who were anti-American and jihadist, said Bharara, specifically because of the uniqueness of her being a woman and highly educated, and there were those used it as an excuse for “extreme acts of violence” like had been seen at the synagogue in Texas, “to show solidarity with her and try to get her released.”
Acosta asked about how those types of messages showed up on social media and how law enforcement might monitor that.
Bharara replied that Siddiqui was not the only one who was under surveillance because of her comments about other previous terrorist attacks, and her interactions with other people that “caused concern” to military, intelligence, and law enforcement officials. He praised the work of the FBI and local law enforcement in being able to end the standoff with the hostages unharmed.
“You can’t catch everything in advance,” Bharara concluded, noting that he had not seen the details of the investigation into Akram, “what signals he might have given” and “how much it really looked like he would do something.”
“But there’s a lot of this that goes on, thousands of people in the American government who pay attention to this every day,” he said.
Watch the video above, via CNN.