39 Indians abducted by IS in Iraq dead: Sushma

TRAGIC END New Delhi’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 militants. 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. One fact that stood out, Swaraj later said at a press conference, was that there were exactly 39 bodies under the mound.

“We felt these were our people. So we contacted Martyrs Foundation to get the bodies exhumed,” she said. When the area was excavated, identification marks such as non-Iraqi shoes, long hair, and kadas associated with the Sikh faith were found. This prompted DNA tests to be carried out to confirm their identities.

“Howsoever painful, the families will get the dead bodies after more than three years. This will hopefully bring some closure to them,” Swaraj said, adding that Singh would travel to Iraq to bring back the bodies as soon as the formalities with the Iraqi authorities were completed.

In July last year, Swaraj told the Parliament that she would not declare the 39 Indians dead without concrete proof or evidence of their death.

“It is a sin to declare a person dead without concrete evidence. I will not do this sin,” Swaraj had said in the Lok Sabha.

Some of the relatives of the deceased, however, criticised the government for the way the issue was handled. Davinder Singh, brother of Gobinder Singh, one of the workers from Punjab who was declared dead on Tuesday, said that the government had failed to take the right action to bring his brother back safely. He said that though Masih had said the missing Indians were gunned down, the government kept “lying”.

Gurpinder Kaur, sister of another victim from Punjab, Manjinder Singh, said she found it difficult to believe her brother was dead because Swaraj had assured her that he was alive.

“I heard this on television... We should have been contacted as soon as they received the infor- mation. Had that been done it would not have been such a huge blow. We feel betrayed from all sides.”

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the government had not done right by the families.

“If they didn’t have any details, why did they keep telling everyone the people are alive? The government kept giving the families false hope for four years,” he said.

Swaraj countered the allegation. “I had told the House continuously for three years that until I get proof of their death, I will not close any file. It would have been a sin had we handed over anybody’s body claiming it to be those of our people, just for the sake of closing files,” she added.

“I can understand the anger of families. I see it as a natural reaction. But I would like to say that I have never kept them in the dark,” she told the media.

› Howsoever painful, the families will get the dead bodies after more than three years. This will hopefully bring some closure to them SUSHMA SWARAJ, External Affairs Minister