Former hostage explains why he had children in captivity

TORONTO — Former hostage Joshua Boyle said Monday he and his wife decided to have children even while held captive because they always planned to have a big family and decided, “Hey, let’s make the best of this and at least go home with a larger start on our dream family.”

Boyle, his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, and their three children were rescued Wednesday, five years after the couple was abducted in Afghanistan on a backpacking trip. The children were born in captivity.

“We’re sitting as hostages with a lot of time on our hands,” Boyle told The Associated Press in an email Monday. “We always wanted as many as possible, and we didn’t want to waste time. Cait’s in her 30s, the clock is ticking.”

Boyle said the kids are now four, two and “somewhere around 6 months.”

“Honestly we’ve always planned to have a family of 5, 10, 12 children . . . . We’re Irish, haha,” he wrote.

Coleman was pregnant at the time of their abduction and had the children while she was a hostage.

Boyle said after landing at Toronto’s airport that the Taliban-linked Haqqani network killed their infant daughter and raped his wife during the years they were held.

In the email exchange, Boyle did not respond to a question about the fourth child. The Taliban said in a statement on Sunday that it was a miscarriage.

Boyle has said conditions during the fiveyear ordeal changed over time as the family was shuffled among at least three prisons. He has described the first as remarkably barbaric, the second as more comfortable and the third as a place of violence in which he and his wife were frequently separated and beaten.