39 Indian Workers Abducted By ISIS From Iraq In 2014 Have Been Killed, Says Sushma Swaraj
Sushma Swaraj told the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday that the government is presuming them to be dead. She also said that the bodies of the suspected victims were recovered from a mass grave. The bodies have been sent for DNA test where they will be examined against the samples from those of their relatives. The men mostly from punjab were taken hostage by ISIS in 2014 from Mosul.
Nearly four years after they were taken hostage by suspected ISIS operatives in Mosul, Iraq, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj told the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday that the government is presuming them to be dead.
This comes after Swaraj said that the bodies of the suspected victims were recovered from a mass grave. The bodies have been sent for DNA test where they will be examined against the samples from those of their relatives.
BCCL/File
"It was a most difficult task to get the proof. Such a barbaric terror organization, there were mass graves. It was a pile of bodies. To track down the bodies of our people and take them to Baghdad to test was a huge task," Swaraj said in the Rajya Sabha.
She also told the house that the government received the confirmation only on Monday and till then it believed that they were alive and were making effort for their release.
Swaraj who had multiple times met the families of the victims had assured their loved ones were alive and government was making all efforts to bring them back.
BCCL/ File
What actually happened?
The men, mostly from punjab were taken hostage by ISIS in 2014 from Mosul along with some Bangladeshi workers as they tried to flee the city which was overrun by ISIS.
While the Bangladeshi workers were later freed, one indian national, Harjit Masih, managed to escape the abductors and made it back to the country with the help of MEA.
BCCL/File
Masih had claimed that the 39 others were shot dead by ISIS and he was shot on the foot, which gave him a chance to escape.
The government, however, rejected Masih's claim and citing multiple foreign intelligence sources maintained that the men were alive.
Bobins Abraham is the Assistant News Editor at Indiatimes. He has more than twelve years of experience in TV and digital journalism. An avid student of history and geopolitics, he is a conservationist and environmentalist at heart. He writes on environment, sustainability, human-animal conflict and more.
Read More