'Unidentified Pak woman detained at Bagram airbase for more than four years'

Islamabad, July 7 : An unidentified Pakistani woman has been held in solitary confinement at the US-run Bagram airbase detention facility in Afghanistan for more than four years, British journalist Yvonne Ridley who spent 11 days at the detention facility in 2001, has revealed.

The woman is registered as 'Prisoner Number 650' at the detention centre and the US officials can't deny the fact, Ridley said and added: "I demand that the US military free the Grey Lady immediately. We don't know her identity, we don't know her state of mind and we don't know the extent of the abuse or torture she has been subjected to."

"Today I am crying out for help, not for myself but for a Pakistani woman neither you nor I have ever met. She has been held in isolation by the Americans in Afghanistan and she needs help," the Daily Times quoted Ridley as saying.

Ridley said she first learnt about the woman while reading a book by Guantanamo ex-detainee Moazzam Begg, and added that one of the four Arabs who escaped from the Bagram cell in July 2005 also told a TV channel that he had heard a woman's cries and screams in the prison but never saw her. "I call her the Grey Lady of Bagram because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her," she said.

This would never happen to a Western woman, she added.

Taliban had captured Ridley in September 2001 for entering Afghanistan without legal documents. She was freed after 11-day detention and later embraced Islam in June 2003.

The paper quoted Tehrik-e-Insaf chief Imran Khan as saying that the woman could be Dr Aafia Siddiqui who was picked from a Pakistani airport few years back. He added that keeping any one in illegal detention was "violation of human rights".

ANI