‘Kidnappers raped my wife and murdered our baby girl’
FORMER hostage Joshua Boyle has revealed that Afghan kidnappers killed his infant daughter and raped his wife during the years when they were in captivity.
Mr Boyle, 34, laid bare his family’s torment shortly after landing in Canada early on Saturday morning with his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, 31, and three young children.
They were rescued on Wednesday, five years after being abducted by the Taliban-linked extremist Haqqani network while in Afghanistan as part of a backpacking trip.
Coleman was pregnant at the time and had four children in captivity.
Boyle told journalists at 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.’
Boyle said his wife was raped by a guard, who was assisted by his superiors. He called for the Afghan regime to bring them to justice.
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.’
The family declined to board a US military plane out of Pakistan and instead decided to take a plane from Pakistan to the UK and then from there to Canada.
One US official said Boyle was nervous about being in ‘custody’ given his first marriage to the sister of Omar Kadhr, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee with suspected ties to Al-Qaeda.
His refusal to board the plane, along with his selfcharacterisation as a ‘pilgrim’, and his previous marriage, have raised questions as to why he and Coleman were in Afghanistan in 2012.
On the plane from London, Boyle gave a written statement to journalists, opposing US foreign policy.
A spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said the raid that led to the family’s rescue was based on a tip from US intelligence.
Boyle told his parents that he and his family were intercepted by Pakistani forces while being transported in the back of their captors’ car.
One of the captors yelled ‘Kill the hostages!’ during the ensuing shootout, but Boyle managed to emerge with only a shrapnel wound, according to his family.