A US judge has sentenced Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui to eighty-six years in prison for shooting at her American interrogators while in detention in Afghanistan. Her conviction and sentencing has been widely criticized in Pakistan, where Siddiqui is believed to have been innocent and mistreated in US detention. US authorities said Siddiqui was arrested in July 2008 by Afghan police, but many human rights groups have alleged that Siddiqui was forcibly disappeared by Pakistani authorities in 2003 and interrogated and tortured at the behest of the United States. In her testimony, Siddiqui claimed to have been held in a US secret prison. In Pakistan, Aafia Siddiqui’s sister Fauzia criticized the eighty-six-year sentence.

Fauzia Siddiqui: “We had no better expectations from this judge. I mean, anything less than a hundred would be clemency on his part, I would say. He has proven — he has proven today to the whole world that the American justice system, the American justice system that America used to pride on, no longer exists.”