KARACHI, 13 February 2005 — Farhat Paracha, wife of Pakistani businessman Saifullah Paracha who has been held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp for the past 19 months by US authorities for suspected ties with Al-Qaeda, says she and her three children are suffering immensely due to “lack of conscience on the part of the Pakistani government.”
Speaking at a news conference at Karachi Press Club, she said that even though her husband was arrested 19 months ago, no case been brought against him in a court of law so far.
She was with her children — Muneeza, Mustafa and Zehra — and Khalid Khawaja, a close friend of her husband, at the press conference. She said it was true that Saifullah Paracha met Osama Bin Laden twice and was very impressed by him, but he had nothing to do with terrorism.
She said as the head of a 65-member business delegation, Saifullah went to Afghanistan and had business meetings with a small number of people there, but had nothing to do with the charges framed against him by the Bush administration.
“My husband is a casualty of terrorism,” she said.
She alleged that the Pakistani government had totally submitted to the dictates of Washington and what happened to Saifullah could happen to anyone. “It can happen to you, it can happen to anybody,” she said.
According to US investigators, Saifullah, 58, urged Al-Qaeda operatives to acquire nuclear weapons for use against US troops. The allegation, contained in documents filed recently in US District Court in Washington, also identifies Saifullah, who has an import business in New York, as a participant in a plot to smuggle explosives into the United States and to help Al-Qaeda hide “large amounts of money,” according to newspaper reports.
At a military tribunal reviewing his case in November last year at the US naval base in Cuba, Saifullah vigorously denied any ties to Al-Qaeda and scoffed at the nuclear allegation, newspaper reports said.
At her Karachi press conference, Farhat said her husband was a prominent Pakistani businessman and respected citizen and had been unlawfully arrested by a foreign power and was being tortured physically and mentally.
