I’ll bring dad home
Daughter of aid worker murdered by Islamic State will return to Syria to dig up his remains
SHE lost her father in the most brutal and public of circumstances while she was still a teenager.
But five years on from aid worker David Haines’s murder at the hands of Islamic State (IS) fanatics, his daughter has vowed to bring his remains home after pinpointing what she believes is the scene of his death.
Mr Haines, 44, from Perth, was beheaded in Syria after being abducted and held for 18 months by a terrorist cell dubbed ‘The Beatles’, whose members included Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John.
Six months ago, 23-year-old Bethany Haines visited the war-torn country with an ITN news crew in order to uncover where her father was executed and buried.
Her journey led her close to the site where it is believed he was killed in a video that shocked the world. The trip ended in disappointment when the area was deemed too unsafe to visit, but the mother of one is making fresh plans to return with a team who can help her excavate the site.
In a newspaper interview, she said that she had been forced to carry out her own painstaking research to track down the precise spot after finding it difficult to do so through official sources. She said: ‘I have the precise co-ordinates of where we think [his body] is.
‘On the video, it doesn’t seem like there is a lot in the area as it is pretty desolate. But in the background, you can see certain features, like a tree, which we have managed to track down on Google Earth. We do have a precise location. If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong – but at least I will know I’ve tried.’
She added: ‘I’ve seen what happened to my dad on the video but there’s always been part of me that hoped it maybe wasn’t how it seemed.
‘Finding the body would be difficult, but it would also allow us to properly grieve and bring the bodies back home so they can be put to rest.’
Mr Haines, who was helping refugees near the TurkishSyrian border, was beheaded by Emwazi in September 2014.
Since his murder, Miss Haines has been putting pressure on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to help find the bodies of Mr Haines and the other IS hostages, but she told the Daily Record: ‘It’s difficult getting a straight answer from them.’
She added: ‘Until I have managed to go there and do the dig and know whether he is there, I won’t be able to move on. I’ll always wonder, “What if?”’
An FCO source said recovering the remains of all the hostages is ‘a priority’.