MOMENT OF TRUTH, AFTER FOUR YEARS

39 Indians missing in Iraq were found in mass grave, admits government

All the 39 Indians abducted by the ISIS terror outfit in Mosul in Iraq three years ago are dead and their bodies have been recovered, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Tuesday.

While 31 of those abducted were from Punjab, the rest were from Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. The news may have brought closure to families who were awaiting the return of their loved ones; however, it has come as a shock for the kin of the deceased, who until now believed them to be alive. The deceased were mostly construction workers and abducted in 2014.

While it was not immediately known when the Indians were killed, their bodies were recovered from Badosh - a village in northwest of Mosul, and their identities established through DNA testing, she said while making a suo motu statement in the Rajya Sabha.

The mortal remains, which were exhumed from a mass grave in Badosh, will be brought back to India on a special plane and handed over to their relatives, she said. "I had said that I will not declare anyone dead without substantive proof... today I have come to fulfil that commitment," she said.

The opposition erupted after the revelation; the Congress accused the government of giving the missing Indians' families false hope and misleading the nation. Congress lawmaker Ghulam Nabi Azad reminded Swaraj that she had "assured us last year that the Indians were alive". The Left also questioned the three-year delay in declaring their deaths and created an uproar in the House.

Swaraj took exception to the protests, and said that the Congress was indulging in “cheap politics” by disrupting proceedings in the Lok Sabha when she was to make a statement on the deaths. She reiterated that the government had not kept anyone in the dark. “It was not falsehood but tireless effort to identify the victims,” she said, adding that no government could declare anyone dead without proof.

The external affairs minister said that it would have been a sin had the government handed over anybody's body claiming it to be those of our people, just for the sake of closing the files. “We had been saying that we neither have the evidence of them being alive nor the evidence of them being dead. We maintained this in 2014 and 2017. We did not keep anyone in dark. We gave no false hopes to anyone,” she said.

Giving details of how the government confirmed the deaths, the foreign minister revealed how technology and assistance from Iraqi authorities led New Delhi to the bodies of the 39 Indians. The bodies was detected when MoS VK Singh scoured the Badush area along with the Indian envoy.

The MEA left no stone unturned in trying to trace and safely bring back those we lost in Mosul: Modi

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