For more than a decade, Pakistani neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui has been imprisoned in a U.S. facility. Claims suggesting that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui has been released have recently circulated across social media platforms.
See Facebook posts promoting the claim here (link) (archive), here (link) (archive), here (link) (archive), and here (link) (archive).

In addition, this claim has also been spread with a photo of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.
See such Facebook posts here (link) (archive), here (link) (archive), and here (link) (archive).
A different image has also been used to spread the claim of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s release on Facebook. See such posts here (link) (archive) and here (link) (archive).
Fact Check
The Rumor Scanner team’s investigation revealed that the claim about Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s release is false, and the circulated images are of Palestinian prisoners released after a ceasefire. In reality, Dr. Siddiqui’s lawyer requested a pardon from outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden, but the request was denied. As a result, she continues to remain in custody.
During the investigation, no information or evidence supporting the claim of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s release was found in the media or any reliable sources. However, a news report published by UK-based media outlet Sky News on January 18 (archive) states that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s lawyer submitted a dossier to outgoing President Joe Biden, hoping for her pardon, as they considered her conviction a clear miscarriage of justice. Biden had until January 20, when the next U.S. president, Donald Trump, was to be sworn in. Until the report’s publication, Biden had granted 39 pardons and commuted 3,989 sentences.
However, no news about a pardon for Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was reported. A review of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith’s X (formerly Twitter) account, indicates that on January 20, he posted (link) confirming that Joe Biden declined to grant Dr. Aafia Siddiqui a pardon. A few hours later, in the early hours of January 21, he posted another message (link) with a screenshot, stating:
“Incompetent as well as inhuman: they can’t get anything right: Biden’s website still says Aafia’s clemency is still pending & they sent the denial to an address I never gave them that I left 4 years ago…”
Later, Rumor Scanner checked the clemency status on the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney’s website (link) using Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s clemency case number and found that, as of January 20, the application status had been updated to “denied.”

Additionally, upon investigating the images circulated with the claims of Aafia Siddiqui’s release, a report published on January 20 by UK-based media outlet Middle East Eye (archive) was found to include one of the discussed images. The report states that the image is of a Palestinian prisoner released in Gaza after the ceasefire. The same information is corroborated by other media outlets (source 1, source 2).
The second image circulated with claims about Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is listed on the Reuters website as part of their “Pictures of the Day” for January 20 (archive). According to the description, the image shows a Palestinian prisoner released from an Israeli jail being welcomed in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as part of the Gaza ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel.

Thus, the circulated images are unrelated to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.
Conclusion
No credible evidence supports the claim of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s release. The shared images are unrelated, and her clemency request to President Biden was officially denied. Therefore, the claim is false.
References
- Sky News – Aafia Siddiqui: Doctor accused of terrorism calls for presidential pardon before Biden hands over to Trump
- Clive Stafford Smith – X Post
- Clive Stafford Smith – X Post
- Office of the Pardon Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice – Clemency Case Status.
- Middle East Eye – Despite Israeli delays and restrictions, a first wave of Palestinian prisoners celebrates freedom.
- Reuters – Pictures of the Day | January 20, 2025