Fate of 39 Indians missing in Iraq still unknown
NEW DELHI: Iraq’s foreign minister said Monday he does not know whether 39 Indian workers who were abducted by militants in Iraq three years ago are dead or alive.
Foreign Minister Ibrahim Al-Jaafari met with his Indian counterpart, Sushma Swaraj, and other Indian officials in New Delhi. He arrived on Monday for a four-day visit.
“We are not sure 100 percent whether they are alive or not,” he told reporters, adding that he could not say anything more about their fate.
Swaraj had told relatives of the workers last week that they might be held in a prison in Badush, northwest of Mosul, which Iraqi forces have taken back from Daesh. Her statement came after a visit to Iraq by Indian Junior External Affairs Minister V.K. Singh.
An Indian news channel reported from Iraq that the prison was demolished by Daesh.
The abducted workers, mostly from northern India, had been employed by a construction company near Mosul when militants overran the Iraqi city and seized wide swathes of territory.
Relatives in the northern Indian city of Amritsar said they received phone calls from some of the workers five days after Mosul was captured saying that they were in trouble and needed help.
Around 10,000 Indians worked and lived in Iraq at that time.
German runaway found in Iraq wants to go home
A teenage German girl who ran away after converting to Islam and was found by Iraqi troops in Mosul says she wants to go home, a German newspaper and broadcaster reported Monday.
“I just want to go back home to my family,” 16-year-old Linda Wenzel said. “I want to get away from the war, away from all the weapons, away from the noise.”
German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and public broadcaster ARD said their reporter interviewed the girl in Baghdad after she was found earlier this month as Iraqi forces liberated the northern city of Mosul from Daesh. She could theoretically face the death penalty in Iraq for membership in Daesh, according to the country’s counter-terrorism law.
Wenzel ran away from her home in the small eastern German town of Pulsnitz last summer, shortly after converting to Islam, according to German security officials. She had been in touch with Daesh members online and was married to one of the extremists after arriving in the group’s territory.
Her husband died shortly after the marriage, the German media reported.
The girl said she had been hiding in a basement in Mosul when Iraqi soldiers captured her. She said she is “doing fine” despite a bullet wound in her left leg that she said “is from a helicopter attack.”
She is currently in a military hospital ward in Baghdad, according to the report.