Wife of suspected al-Qaida operative wanted U.S. to put her husband on trial

The wife of Omar al-Farouq, a top suspected al-Qaida operative who recently escaped from a tightly guarded detention complex in Afghanistan, said Wednesday the U.S. government should have put her husband on trial.

"My husband was kidnapped by America but they never officially told us ... for more than three years," al-Farouq's wife Mira Agustina said. "I don't believe that my husband was a terrorist. He is only an ordinary man who cried when he watched movies about violence."

Al-Farouq was one of four suspected Arab terrorists to escape from a heavily fortified detention facility inside a U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan, in July. Although the escape was widely reported at the time, al-Farouq was identified by an alias and the U.S. military only confirmed this week that he was among those who fled.

"I just wanted America to put him on trial," Agustina told reporters at her modest home in the village of Cisalada, about 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of Jakarta. Unusual in Indonesia, during the interview Agustina, 27, was clad in a full-body black veil, with only her eyes showing.

Agustina said she had married al-Farouq in 1999, when the Kuwait-born Iraqi was allegedly establishing a militant network in Indonesia. He was arrested in 2002 and turned over to U.S. authorities who jailed him at their maximum-security prison in Bagram.

"I was shocked when news broke that my husband was a terrorist wanting to kill many people," she said, adding that she told her two daughters that their father had gone off to America "to work», reports the AP. I.L.