Sushma Swaraj

Opposition Congress condoled the deaths but its leader and Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad sought to remind the government that it had “assured us last year that the Indians were alive”.

“Howsoever painful, the families will get the dead bodies after over three years. This will hopefully bring some closure to the grieving families,” she said later at a press conference, adding that the government had done everything possible to trace the missing persons.

Last July, Swaraj had told 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 Lok Sabha in 2017.

Some relatives, however, criticised the government.

Davinder Singh, brother of Gobinder Singh, one the missing workers hailing from Punjab, said the family had been waiting for a response from the Centre since 2014. He felt the government had failed to take the right action to bring his brother back safely. Even Masih had claimed the workers had been killed on June 15, 2014, but the government kept lying, he pointed out, adding that the family had got a call from the government on Tuesday morning about Gobinder’s death.

Gurpinder Kaur, the sister of another Punjab native, Manjinder Singh, who was among those killed, found it difficult to believe her brother was dead. “I heard this on television. Until the MEA (ministry of external affairs) does not contact me, I will not believe this,” Gurpinder insisted. “We should have been contacted as soon as they received the information. Had that been done it would not have been such a huge blow. We feel betrayed from all sides.”

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

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

Swaraj countered the charges and said she was duty-bound to tell Parliament first, and that the government did not keep anyone in the dark. “Since the session of the Parliament was on, it was my responsibility to inform the House first,” Swaraj said.

Swaraj dismissed Masih’s narrative that he had witnessed the massacre of the other workers. “His was a cock-and-bull story,” Swaraj told Rajya Sabha, adding he had managed to flee the ISIS by faking his identity as a Muslim from Bangladesh.

“It is indeed a moment of deep grief and sadness for us,” India’s ambassador to Iraq, Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit said.