Wife raped, daughter killed
Freed hostage Joshua Boyle says the Haqqani network in Afghanistan had killed his infant daughter and raped his wife during their captivity.
TORONTO: Former hostage Joshua Boyle said upon arriving back in Canada that the Haqqani network in Afghanistan had killed his infant daughter and raped his American wife during the years they were held in captivity.
Boyle gave the statement after landing in Canada late Friday with his wife, Caitlan Coleman, and three young children.
The family was rescued Wednesday, five years after they had been abducted by the Talibanlinked extremist network while in Afghanistan as part of a backpacking trip.
Coleman was pregnant at the time and had four children in captivity. The birth of the fourth child had not been publicly known before Boyle appeared before journalists at the Toronto airport.
“The stupidity and evil of the Haqqani network’s kidnapping of a pilgrim and his heavily pregnant wife engaged in helping ordinary villagers in Talibancontrolled regions of Afghanistan was eclipsed only by the stupidity and evil of authorising the murder of my infant daughter,” he said.
Boyle said his wife was raped by a guard who was assisted by his superiors. He asked for the Afghan government to bring them to justice.
“God willing, this litany of stu- pidity will be the epitaph of the Haqqani network,” he said.
He said he was in Afghanistan to help villagers “who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help”.
“God has given me and my family unparalleled resilience and determination, and to allow that to stagnate, to pursue personal pleasure or comfort while there is still deliberate and organised injustice in the world would be a betrayal of all I believe, and tantamount to sacrilege,” he wrote in a statement on the flight from London.
“It will be of incredible importance to my family that we are able to build a secure sanctuary for our three surviving children to call a home,” he said in his later statement at the airport. “To try to regain some portion of the childhood that they have lost.”
The Canadian government said in a statement they will “continue to support him and his family now that they have returned”.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Nafees Zakaria, said the Pakistani raid that led to the family’s rescue was based on a tip-off from US intelligence and shows that Pakistan will act against a “common enemy” when Washington shares information.