39 Indians abducted by IS in Iraq dead: Sushma

27 FROM PUNJAB Govt’s sustained efforts prove futile, dashing families’ hopes

NEWDELHI: The 39 Indian workers who had been kidnapped in Iraq in June 2014 by the Islamic State are dead, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj told Parliament on Tuesday.

The minister said that their bodies were found in a mass grave in Badush village in the northern part of that country, and that DNA tests had provided incontrovertible proof establishing the identity of 38 of the 39 missing Indians. The sample of the 39th man — Raju Yadav from Bihar — was still being tested and had shown a partial match, she added.

Though Swaraj’s announcement brought closure to one of the longest search operations in India’s history for missing citizens, some of the family members of the victims said they felt “betrayed” by the government for “keeping them in the dark”.

It also sparked a war of words between the government and the Opposition, with senior Congress leaders blaming the Centre for giving “false hopes” to the families of the victims for all these years, pointing to comments made by Swaraj in Parliament in 2014 and 2017 that the Indians could not be declared dead.

Forty Indians working in a factory in Mosul had been captured by militants in the Iraqi city of Mosul four years ago.

One man, Harjit Masih, managed to escape, and had said that he had seen the others killed by a firing squad. Masih had said that he had been shot in the leg in the mass execution and had been seemingly left for dead by the mil--

itants. The government consistently refused to believe his claim on the grounds that the circumstances of his escape did not check out.

Swaraj again said that Masih’s narration of how events had transpired in Iraq was false, and that he had escaped by pretending to be a Bangladeshi Muslim at a time when the other Indians were still alive.

She stressed that the government had been waiting for concrete evidence before declaring its citizens dead, which had only been found now.

“Yesterday, they (Martyrs Foundation, a body of Iraqi government) told us that 38 DNA samples had matched. The 39th had a partial match as he didn’t have (a sample from) any immediate

family,” said Swaraj. The DNA of the Indian workers — 27 from Punjab, four from Himachal Pradesh, six from Bihar and two from West Bengal -- had been collected in last September, two months after the fall of Mosul.

Swaraj said that the search for the Indians intensified when none of them called home or contacted their families even after Mosul was liberated. She said that minister of state for external affairs, VK Singh, and Iraqi government officials were told by a local in Badush last year to inspect a mound in the village where several people had been buried.

“We reached there and requested the Iraqi authorities to use a deep penetration radar, which detected many bodies under the surface,” she told Rajya Sabha.